Hours worked · federal baseline · TY2026
What counts as hours worked
Most pay disputes aren't tax disputes — they're timekeeping disputes. Here is what federal law says about rounding, breaks, on-call time, and the work that happens before you clock in, each with the regulation behind it.
The 7-minute rounding rule
The regulation permits rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth of an hour, or quarter hour, provided it does not, over time, fail to pay employees for all time actually worked (29 CFR §785.48(b)).
The familiar “first 7 minutes round down, last 7 round up” formulation — 8:07 becomes 8:00, 8:08 becomes 8:15 — follows from quarter-hour rounding, but note that the phrase “7 minutes” appears nowhere in the regulation. It comes from industry practice and DOL's Field Operations Handbook. The binding requirement is the averaging test, not the 7-minute line.
One more boundary worth knowing: 29 CFR Part 785 is an interpretive bulletin, not a legislative rule — courts weigh it as persuasive authority rather than treating it as binding.
| Clock in | Rounded | Clock out | Rounded | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | 8:57 | 9:00 | 5:03 | 5:00 |
| Day 2 | 8:52 | 8:45 | 5:08 | 5:15 |
| Day 3 | 9:08 | 9:15 | 5:07 | 5:00 |
| Day 4 | 8:46 | 8:45 | 5:14 | 5:15 |
| Day 5 | 9:03 | 9:00 | 4:52 | 4:45 |
Across this week the rounding gives back 16 minutes and takes 24 — an 8-minute net loss (2,438 minutes actually worked, 2,430 paid). One week proves nothing; a pattern over months is the thing to document. Convert your actual punches with the time to decimal calculator and compare against what was paid.
Short breaks are paid; meal periods usually aren't
- Rest breaks of about 5 to 20 minutes are common in industry and, when offered, must be counted as hours worked and paid (29 CFR §785.18). An employer may choose not to offer them, but cannot offer them unpaid. (Narrow exception: break time to express breast milk under the PUMP Act need not be paid, so long as the employee is fully relieved of duty.)
- Bona fide meal periods — ordinarily 30 minutes or more — are not hours worked, but only if you are completely relieved of duty (29 CFR §785.19). Eating at your desk while covering the phones is a working lunch, and it is paid.
Waiting, on-call, and travel
- Engaged to wait vs waiting to be engaged. Time you spend waiting as part of the job — a receptionist between callers — is paid. Time you're genuinely free to use for yourself is not (29 CFR §785.14, with worked examples at §785.15).
- On-call time is paid when the constraints are tight enough that you can't effectively use the time for your own purposes — required to stay on premises, or (per case law rather than the regulation itself) a response window so short it confines you (29 CFR §785.17). Merely carrying a phone usually isn't enough.
- The ordinary commute is not paid (29 CFR §785.35).
- Travel between job sites during the workday is paid — as is travel from a required meeting point to the work site (29 CFR §785.38).
- A special one-day trip to another city is compensable travel — but your employer may deduct the commute you would have made anyway (29 CFR §785.37).
- Overnight travel counts as hours worked when it falls within your normal working hours — including the same hours on a weekend. As a passenger outside those hours, it generally does not (29 CFR §785.39).
Off-the-clock work still counts
Work that is “suffered or permitted” is work time — if the employer knows or has reason to believe you are working, it must be paid (29 CFR §785.11). That holds for work done away from the premises too, such as answering messages from home (§785.12).
A rule forbidding the work is not a defence: management “has the power to enforce the rule and must make every effort to do so” — the remedy for unauthorized work is discipline, not withholding pay (§785.13).
One narrow exception: de minimis time — uncertain and indefinite periods of a few seconds or minutes that are administratively impractical to record (29 CFR §785.47, after Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946)). It is far narrower than employers often assume: the same regulation states an employer “may not arbitrarily fail to count as hours worked any part, however small, of the employee's fixed or regular working time.”
Why this page exists
Our overtime calculator computes 1.5× over 40 hours. But “40 hours” is not a neutral fact — it is the output of every rule above. If unpaid pre-shift work or a working lunch pushed your real total past 40, the overtime you're owed changes before any multiplication happens.
This page explains federal rules; it is not legal advice. For a dispute, contact the DOL Wage and Hour Division or your state labor office.