Waiting, Call Time, and Cleaning Time Are Hours Worked in Minnesota — and Under Federal Law the Question Is Whether the Employer Knew, Not Whether It Approved

Minnesota’s rule is one paragraph, and it is in the rules rather than the statute

Chapter 177 sets the minimum wage and the overtime threshold but does not define what an hour of work is. The Department of Labor and Industry’s rule does. Minn. R. 5200.0120, subp. 1:

The minimum wage must be paid for all hours worked. Hours worked include training time, call time, cleaning time, waiting time, or any other time when the employee must be either on the premises of the employer or involved in the performance of duties in connection with his or her employment or must remain on the premises until work is prepared or available. Rest periods of less than 20 minutes may not be deducted from total hours worked.

Four categories are named and the fifth is open-ended. The closing sentence is the one that decides the most arguments. A rest period of less than 20 minutes may not be deducted from total hours worked, and subpart 1 opens by requiring that the minimum wage be paid for all hours worked. Since January 1, 2026, Minn. Stat. § 177.253, subd. 1, has required a rest break “of at least 15 minutes or enough time to utilize the nearest convenient restroom, whichever is longer,” so a break given at that statutory floor is a rest period of less than 20 minutes, and this rule bars deducting it from the employee’s hours worked. A break the employer makes 20 minutes or longer falls outside the sentence, and so does a rest break set differently by a collective bargaining agreement under subdivision 2. The break entitlement itself is on breaks and overtime after January 1, 2026.

The three remaining subparts draw the boundaries.

On call, subp. 2: “An employee who is required to remain on the employer’s premises or so close to the premises that the employee cannot use the time effectively for the employee’s own purposes is working while on call. An employee who is not required to remain on or near the employer’s premises, but is merely required to leave word at the employee’s home or with company officials where the employee may be reached is not working while on call.”

Off duty, subp. 3: “Periods when the employee is completely relieved of duty and free to leave the premises for a definite period of time, and the period is long enough for the employee to use for the employee’s own purposes, are not hours worked.” Three conditions, all of them: completely relieved, free to leave, and for a definite period long enough to use.

Meals, subp. 4: “Bona fide meal periods are not hours worked. Bona fide meal periods do not include rest periods such as coffee breaks or time for snacks. The employee must be completely relieved from duty for the purpose of eating regular meals. Thirty minutes or more is ordinarily long enough for a bona fide meal period. A shorter period may be adequate under special conditions. The employee is not completely relieved from duty if required to perform any duties, whether active or inactive, while eating. It is not necessary that an employee be permitted to leave the premises, if the employee is otherwise completely freed from duties during the meal period. If the meal period is frequently interrupted by calls to duty, the employee is not relieved of all duties and the meal periods must be considered as hours worked.”

The last sentence is the operative one for anyone whose lunch is a phone. Frequent interruption does not shorten the meal period; it converts it.

Sleeping time, long shifts, and living where you work

Minn. R. 5200.0121 handles the shifts that run past a day.

Under subp. 1, an employee “required to be on duty for less than 24 hours is working even though the employee is permitted to sleep or engage in other personal activities when not busy,” subject to one statutory exception discussed below.

Under subp. 2, where the duty period is 24 hours or more, the employer and employee “may agree to exclude bona fide meal periods and a bona fide regularly scheduled sleeping period of not more than eight hours from hours worked, provided adequate sleeping facilities are furnished by the employer and the employee can usually enjoy an uninterrupted sleeping period.” Three limits ride with that agreement: “If a sleeping period is of more than eight hours, only eight hours may be excluded.” “Where no expressed or implied agreement to the contrary is present, the lunch periods and up to eight hours of sleeping time constitute hours worked.” And interruption is costly to the employer: “If the sleeping period is interrupted by a call to duty, the interruption must be counted as hours worked. If the period is interrupted so that the employee cannot get a minimum of five hours of sleep, the entire period must be counted as hours worked.”

Under subp. 3, an employee “who resides on the employer’s premises on a permanent basis or for extended periods of time is not considered as working all the time the employee is on the premises.”

Two statutory provisions sit alongside those rules and are easy to miss because they are in a definitions section rather than an hours section.

Minn. Stat. § 177.23, subd. 10, covers on-site residential staff. For “any caretaker, manager, or other on-site employee of a residential building or buildings whose principal place of residence is in the residential building,” including one who receives housing as full or partial compensation, “hours worked” includes time performing any duties of employment “but does not mean time when the caretaker, manager, or other on-site employee is on the premises and available to perform duties of employment and is not performing duties of employment.”

Minn. Stat. § 177.23, subd. 11, is the exception that subp. 1 of the rule points to. For an individual employed to provide companionship services to a person unable to care for their own needs because of age or infirmity, employed to stay overnight in that person’s home, and “paid the minimum wage or more for at least four hours associated with the overnight stay,” the term “hours” for minimum wage and overtime purposes under §§ 177.24 and 177.25 excludes “nighttime hours, from 10:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m., up to a total of eight hours per night, during which the employee is available to perform duties for the aged or infirm individual, but is not in fact performing such duties and is free to sleep and otherwise engage in normal private pursuits in the aged or infirm individual’s home.” The subdivision defines “companionship services” by reference to “Code of Federal Regulations, title 29, sections 552.6 and 552.106 as of March 1, 1984” — a frozen cross-reference, not a moving one.

Off the clock: the federal test is knowledge, not permission

Waiting to be engaged, or engaged to wait

The federal waiting-time regulations are built on a distinction the Supreme Court drew in 1944 and the Wage and Hour Division quotes. 29 C.F.R. § 785.14: whether waiting time is time worked “depends upon particular circumstances,” and the determination “involves ‘scrutiny and construction of the agreements between particular parties, appraisal of their practical construction of the working agreement by conduct, consideration of the nature of the service, and its relation to the waiting time, and all of the circumstances. Facts may show that the employee was engaged to wait or they may show that he waited to be engaged.’”

Section 785.15 works the “on duty” side through examples — “[a] stenographer who reads a book while waiting for dictation, a messenger who works a crossword puzzle while awaiting assignments, fireman who plays checkers while waiting for alarms and a factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired are all working during their periods of inactivity” — and explains why: “The periods during which these occur are unpredictable. They are usually of short duration. In either event the employee is unable to use the time effectively for his own purposes. It belongs to and is controlled by the employer. In all of these cases waiting is an integral part of the job. The employee is engaged to wait.”

Section 785.16(a) sets the condition for the other side: an employee “is not completely relieved from duty and cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes unless he is definitely told in advance that he may leave the job and that he will not have to commence work until a definitely specified hour has arrived.” Paragraph (b) runs the truck-driver illustrations, including the one that most clearly is compensable: “A truck driver who has to wait at or near the job site for goods to be loaded is working during the loading period.”

Section 785.17 states the on-call rule in language nearly identical to Minn. R. 5200.0120, subp. 2: an employee required to remain on the premises “or so close thereto that he cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes is working while ‘on call,’” while an employee “merely required to leave word at his home or with company officials where he may be reached is not working while on call.”

Travel: five situations, and a statute that governs all of them

Travel time is the one area where a 1947 statute sits between the employee and the 1938 Act. 29 U.S.C. § 254(a) — section 4 of the Portal-to-Portal Act — provides that, except as subsection (b) provides, no employer shall be subject to liability under the Fair Labor Standards Act for failing to pay minimum wages or overtime for

(1) walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity or activities which such employee is employed to perform, and

(2) activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity or activities,

which occur either prior to the time on any particular workday at which such employee commences, or subsequent to the time on any particular workday at which he ceases, such principal activity or activities.

The same subsection adds that an employer’s vehicle used for commuting, and activities incidental to that use, “shall not be considered part of the employee’s principal activities” where the travel “is within the normal commuting area for the employer’s business or establishment” and the use is subject to an agreement between employer and employee or the employee’s representative.

Subsection (b) is the exception that restores liability, and it is contractual rather than statutory: the employer is not relieved if the activity is compensable by “an express provision of a written or nonwritten contract in effect, at the time of such activity,” or by “a custom or practice in effect, at the time of such activity, at the establishment or other place where such employee is employed, covering such activity, not inconsistent with a written or nonwritten contract.” Subsection (c) narrows even that: an activity counts as compensable under a contract, custom, or practice “only when it is engaged in during the portion of the day with respect to which it is so made compensable.”

The Wage and Hour Division’s summary at 29 C.F.R. § 785.34 adds one limit that cuts the other way: “traveltime at the commencement or cessation of the workday which was originally considered as working time under the Fair Labor Standards Act (such as underground travel in mines or walking from time clock to work-bench) need not be counted as working time unless it is compensable by contract, custom or practice,” but “ordinary travel from home to work (see § 785.35) need not be counted as hours worked even if the employer agrees to pay for it.” That last clause is the regulation’s own; an agreement to pay for the commute does not convert it into hours worked for overtime purposes.

And § 785.41 cuts across all five rows: “Any work which an employee is required to perform while traveling must, of course, be counted as hours worked. An employee who drives a truck, bus, automobile, boat or airplane, or an employee who is required to ride therein as an assistant or helper, is working while riding, except during bona fide meal periods or when he is permitted to sleep in adequate facilities furnished by the employer.”

One narrow federal exclusion belongs here because it is the only one in the statute itself. 29 U.S.C. § 203(o) provides that in determining hours employed for purposes of §§ 206 and 207, “there shall be excluded any time spent in changing clothes or washing at the beginning or end of each workday which was excluded from measured working time during the week involved by the express terms of or by custom or practice under a bona fide collective-bargaining agreement applicable to the particular employee.” It operates only where such an agreement exists.

The workweek is the unit, and the employer picks it once

Minn. R. 5200.0170, subp. 1, defines the measuring period: “a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods. This is true whether the employee is paid on an hourly, piecework, commission, or any other basis. Once the workweek is established, it remains fixed, although it may be changed if the change is intended as permanent rather than as an evasion of the overtime provisions. If no workweek is designated, it shall follow the calendar week.” The commissioner may establish a different period on an employer’s application.

Who has to write the hours down

The duty runs one way. Minn. Stat. § 177.30(a) requires every employer subject to §§ 177.21 to 177.44 to make and keep, among eight categories of record, “(3) the hours worked each day and each workweek by the employee, including for all employees paid at piece rate, the number of pieces completed at each piece rate.” Minn. R. 5200.0100 says what that means in practice, in a single sentence: “By definition, ‘hours worked each day’ includes beginning and ending time of work each day, which shall include a.m. and p.m. designations, and such designations shall be included in the employer’s records.”

The records “must be kept for three years in the premises where an employee works,” § 177.30(a)(8), with a different three-year trigger for public works projects under §§ 177.41 to 177.44, must be “readily available for inspection by the commissioner upon demand” or producible within 72 hours, § 177.30(b), and failing to keep them carries its own fine: the commissioner “may fine an employer up to $1,000 for each failure to maintain records as required by this section, and up to $5,000 for each repeated failure,” § 177.30(c). Federal law imposes a parallel duty: 29 U.S.C. § 211(c) requires every covered employer to “make, keep, and preserve such records of the persons employed by him and of the wages, hours, and other conditions and practices of employment maintained by him.”

Minnesota then says what a gap in those records does in a Department proceeding. Section 177.30(d), repeated word for word at § 177.27, subd. 3: “If the records maintained by the employer do not provide sufficient information to determine the exact amount of back wages due an employee, the commissioner may make a determination of wages due based on available evidence.” The pay-stub and earnings-statement side of the same recordkeeping duty is on the wage theft notice and your pay stub.

What the Supreme Court held about a missing record

Two further points from the opinion, and then a limit on all of it.

The Court described the statutory workweek broadly: “Since the statutory workweek includes all time during which an employee is necessarily required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace, the time spent in these activities must be accorded appropriate compensation.” Anderson, 328 U.S. at 690–91. And it built in a floor: after holding that preliminary activities at the workbench — “putting on aprons and overalls, removing shirts, taping or greasing arms, putting on finger cots, preparing the equipment for productive work, turning on switches for lights and machinery, opening windows and assembling and sharpening tools” — were work, it added that “it is appropriate to apply a de minimis doctrine so that insubstantial and insignificant periods of time spent in preliminary activities need not be included in the statutory workweek.” Anderson, 328 U.S. at 692–93.

The limit. Anderson was decided in June 1946, and Congress enacted the Portal-to-Portal Act on May 14, 1947 — the statute quoted above, which by its own terms reaches activities “engaged in on or after May 14, 1947,” and which relieves an employer of liability for walking, riding, and traveling to and from the place of performance and for preliminary and postliminary activities. The Wage and Hour Division’s own regulation, 29 C.F.R. § 785.34, describes that Act’s effect on traveltime and cites Anderson in doing so. This page states what Anderson held on the day it was decided, and does not say what survives of its treatment of walking time and preliminary activities: no source retrieved for this page decides that question, and no citator was run against the case.

Currency

The Minnesota rules were retrieved from revisor.mn.gov/rules on September 11, 2026. Minn. R. 5200.0120 carries the History line “11 SR 1740” and was published electronically August 7, 2013; 5200.0121 carries the same History line and was published June 11, 2008; 5200.0100 and 5200.0170 carry no History line and were published June 11, 2008. Minn. R. 5200.0120, 5200.0121, and 5200.0170 cite Minn. Stat. § 177.28 — the commissioner’s rulemaking authority — as their statutory authority, and 5200.0120 and 5200.0121 also cite § 181A.12. Minn. R. 5200.0100’s stated statutory authority is Minn. Stat. § 177.30, the recordkeeping section it construes, and nothing else.

The Revisor publishes the 2025 edition of the statutes. Section 177.23’s History line ends “2024 c 110 art 6 s 1,2”; a Table 2 query run per exact section on September 11, 2026 returns four rows, none from the 2025 or 2026 sessions and none touching subd. 10 or subd. 11. Section 177.30’s History line ends “2024 c 110 art 2 s 5,” with no 2025 or 2026 row. Section 177.27’s History line ends “1Sp2025 c 6 art 5 s 6,” an amendment to subd. 5 rather than to subd. 3.

The federal regulations were retrieved from the eCFR versioner API on September 11, 2026, at the most recent issue date then available for title 29, September 9, 2026. Of the part 785 sections quoted here, only § 785.34 carries an amendment note: “[26 FR 190, Jan. 11, 1961, as amended at 76 FR 18860, Apr. 5, 2011].” The federal statutes were retrieved from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute the same day; the most recent amendment note on 29 U.S.C. § 254 is Pub. L. 104-188, § 2102 (Aug. 20, 1996), which added the employer-vehicle sentence in subsection (a).

Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. was read from the Caselaw Access Project’s archive of volume 328 of the United States Reports. Page pins were taken from the star-page markers in that text.

What this page does not do

This page describes how hours are counted. It does not count anyone’s hours, decide whether a particular waiting period was on duty, or say whether a specific employer knew about work done off the clock — those are questions of fact, and the regulations quoted here are written to be applied to facts rather than to answer them. What the hours are worth once counted is on minimum wage and the tip credit and breaks and overtime after January 1, 2026. Whether the person doing the work is an employee at all comes first, and it is on misclassified as a contractor.