Dive Brief:

• Home Depot will change its policy for hourly employees to pay to the nearest minute based on time punches, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to HR Dive.
• “Our policy has been to round total shift time up or down to the nearest 15 minutes, which has been a common industry practice for many years,” Beth Marlowe, a Home Depot spokesperson, told HR Dive via email. “As laws, technology and workplace practices continue to evolve, we’re changing our practice nationwide effective Jan. 16, 2023, to pay hourly associates to the nearest minute based on exact time punches.”
• Home Depot has faced a number of wage and hour lawsuits over the years. Recently, employees in California filed a putative class-action suit alleging they were underpaid due to the company’s quarter-hour rounding system.

Dive Insight:

Home Depot’s shift comes as experts have been urging employers to move away from rounding.

The Fair Labor Standards Act allows employers to use rounding to the nearest 5-, 10- or 15-minute increment in timekeeping. “Presumably, this arrangement averages out so that the employees are fully compensated for all the time they actually work,” the law states. “For enforcement purposes this practice of computing working time will be accepted, provided that it is used in such a manner that it will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked.”

Certain state laws may apply a more rigorous...

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