Definition: On-call pay is compensation an employer provides for time an employee must be available to work outside regular shifts. Under federal rules, on-call time is paid as hours worked when the employee is required to stay on the employer's premises or is so restricted that they cannot use the time for their own purposes.
On-call arrangements are common in healthcare, maintenance, IT support, property management, utilities, and some restaurant and retail settings. They help cover unpredictable demand, but they raise two practical questions: does the on-call time itself have to be paid, and what happens to pay when an employee is actually called in? The answers depend on federal rules, any state or local scheduling laws, and your own policy.
Employers typically use one of these approaches:
Two maintenance technicians each earn $22.00 per hour and work 36 regular hours in a workweek.
| Technician A (on site) | Technician B (at home) | |
|---|---|---|
| On-call arrangement | Must remain at the facility for 6 hours | Carries a phone; free to run errands; called in once for 2 hours |
| Hours worked | 36 + 6 = 42 | 36 + 2 = 38 |
| Straight time | 40 x $22.00 = $880.00 | 38 x $22.00 = $836.00 |
| Overtime | 2 x $33.00 = $66.00 | $0.00 |
| Total | $946.00 | $836.00 |
Technician A's on-site on-call time is hours worked and pushes the week into overtime. Technician B's at-home time is generally not hours worked in this example, but the 2 hours actually worked are. If Technician B's restrictions were severe, such as very short response times combined with frequent calls, the analysis could change. Use the overtime calculator to model your own scenarios.
The FLSA regulation at 29 CFR 785.17 states that "an employee who is required to remain on call on the employer's premises" is working while on call. It also says that an employee who is not required to remain on or close to the premises, but is merely required to leave word where they may be reached, is not working while on call.
The Department of Labor's hours worked fact sheet adds that an employee who is required to remain on call at home "is not working (in most cases) while on call," but that "additional constraints on the employee's freedom could require this time to be compensated." The same fact sheet distinguishes between being "engaged to wait," which is work time, and "waiting to be engaged," which is not.
When on-call or call-in work is paid, it affects the regular rate. The Department of Labor's regular rate fact sheet says call-back pay can be excluded from the regular rate only if the call-back was not prearranged, and show-up pay can be excluded if paid on an infrequent and sporadic basis.
Some predictive scheduling laws address on-call shifts directly. Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries says that under the state's predictive scheduling law, covered employers must include on-call shifts in posted schedules, and owe half the employee's regular rate for each scheduled hour not worked when an on-call employee is not called in, if the change was made without 14 days' notice. Seattle's Secure Scheduling Ordinance similarly requires half the hours not worked when an employee is scheduled for an on-call shift and is not called in, unless an exception applies. Both laws apply only to covered employers. See predictive scheduling for more.
The answers help show whether on-call time is the employee's own time or is so restricted that it should be treated as hours worked. Document the answers in your policy and revisit them if call frequency changes.
EZTime makes on-call scheduling and call-in tracking straightforward. Managers can build on-call rotations with AI shift scheduling and shift templates, and employees who are called in can clock in from a GPS mobile time clock with geofencing, NFC tags, a tablet kiosk, or biometric clocks. Overtime and break alerts flag when call-ins push someone toward 40 hours, and timecard corrections are tracked with an audit trail. Payroll-ready Excel and PDF exports work with any payroll software; EZTime does not run payroll. Plans start at $2 per employee per month with a 14-day trial. Explore scheduling software or pricing.
This is general information, not legal advice.
It depends. Under 29 CFR 785.17, an employee required to remain on call on the employer’s premises is working. An employee who only needs to leave word where they can be reached is generally not working while on call.
It can be. The Department of Labor says an employee on call at home is not working in most cases, but additional constraints on the employee’s freedom could require the time to be compensated.
When on-call time counts as hours worked, it counts toward the 40-hour weekly overtime threshold for non-exempt employees, just like any other hours worked.
Some local scheduling laws do. For example, Oregon’s predictive scheduling law and Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance require extra pay in certain cases when an employee scheduled for an on-call shift is not called in.