Improved technology may make it more difficult for employers to rely on rounding in timekeeping, a recent U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) wage and hour opinion letter suggests.
In FLSA 2026-8, the DOL was asked if certain pre-shift activities by hospital employees were compensable work and, if so, whether the hospital’s practice of rounding employees’ clock-in time to their scheduled shift start time was permissible.
The DOL declined to conclude the time was or wasn’t de minimis, given the large number of employees involved. “Employers, including the hospital at issue here, should nonetheless be particularly careful about how and to what extent they apply the de minimis doctrine,” the DOL said. “Particularly given the technological advances that have made it possible for employers to track employees’ work time with increasing precision, employers should expect exacting scrutiny of de minimis claims where employees perform off-the-clock work with any degree of regularity.”
The opinion letter emphasized that “timekeeping practices that used to be commonplace — such as rounding — will face increasing scrutiny as technological advances enable increasingly precise time tracking,” said Robert Pritchard, an attorney with Littler in Pittsburgh.
The DOL’s regulations provide that employers may practice time rounding, but only under specific conditions. Employers may round employee time to the nearest fraction of an hour — such as the nearest five or six minutes, or quarter hour.
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