Federal Appeals Court Holds Pre-Shift Waiting Time Compensable When Employees Cannot Start Work

A federal appeals court ruled on October 13, 2026, that an employer has to pay for time an employee spends waiting when the employer told that person to be at work at a set time ready to go and then, through no fault of the employee, there was nothing to do yet.

The decision brought back to life a grocery store clerk’s federal and New York wage claims for shaved time, overturning a trial court that had treated the wait as unpaid setup time falling outside the workday.

The employee said she was told to show up 15 minutes before her shift, that about once a week a manager arrived late and she could not get inside to clock in, and that she lost 15 minutes of pay each week.

The court leaned on federal wage rules that treat someone who chooses to come in early differently from someone ordered to be there at a fixed time who then cannot start. The court also would not throw out the case on the theory that the waits were too small to count, pointing out that the answer depends on how easily the time can be tracked, how much of it piles up, and how often it happens, and that 15 unpaid minutes every week is not obviously too small to matter.

Whether a given wait has to be paid turns on the particular circumstances, including what the employer and the employee agreed to, how they actually operate day to day, the nature of the work, and how the wait relates to it, and the court found she had alleged enough of that to let the case go forward, since she was told to be there ready to work at a fixed time and could not start for reasons she did not control.

The broader lesson for employers is that pre-shift and other onsite waiting situations deserve a close look rather than an assumption that time before a scheduled start is automatically unpaid time, because whether that waiting has to be paid depends on the facts of how each arrangement actually works.

Small increments can add up across a workforce and over an extended period of time, and understanding where those situations exist is what allows an employer to confirm it is meeting applicable wage and hour obligations and limit litigation risk.