PunchReporting Time Pay: What You Owe When a Crew Shows Up and Gets Sent Home (2026)
Reporting Time Pay: What You Owe When a Crew Shows Up and Gets Sent Home (2026)
The short answer: Federal law owes a worker nothing for a shift they report to but do not work. Several states are different. They require reporting time pay, also called show-up pay, when an employee shows up as scheduled and gets sent home early or given no work at all. The amount depends on the state, and it turns on the gap between what the worker was scheduled for and what they actually worked. That gap is only knowable if you have an exact record of when the crew punched in and when they left, which is precisely what Punch captures.
Rain shuts down a roof. Materials do not show up at the site. A client cancels the moment the van pulls in. Your crew already drove out, already stood on the job, and now they are going home two hours into a scheduled eight. Do you owe them for the full day? For the two hours? For nothing? The answer depends on where you operate, and getting it wrong is one of the quieter ways a small field business runs up back-wage exposure. This guide lays out the rules, then shows how to keep the record clean.
Federal Law Sets No Floor
Start with what the FLSA does not do. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires you to pay for hours actually worked. It contains no reporting time pay rule. If a worker reports and gets sent home before doing anything, federal law alone owes them nothing for the trip.
There is one federal wrinkle worth knowing. When a state or a policy does require show-up pay, 29 CFR 778.220 treats the portion of that payment attributable to hours not actually worked as excludable from the regular rate. In plain terms, the premium you pay for a sent-home day is generally not counted as hours worked for overtime and does not inflate the overtime rate. The hours the crew genuinely worked before going home still count. The show-up premium on top does not.
So the federal picture is simple: pay for real work, and if you owe a show-up premium, it lives outside the overtime math. The complication is entirely at the state level.
The States That Require Show-Up Pay
A handful of states, plus the District of Columbia, require reporting time pay for adult workers. The rules vary in both the number of hours and whether they are paid at the regular rate or the minimum wage. Here is the landscape as it stands for 2026. Confirm the current figure and any industry carve-out with your state labor agency before you set a policy.
- California. Under Section 5 of the Industrial Welfare Commission wage orders, if an employee reports as scheduled and is given less than half of their usual or scheduled day's work, you owe half the scheduled day, with a floor of two hours and a ceiling of four hours, at the regular rate. Someone scheduled for eight hours and sent home after one is owed four hours. Someone scheduled for three hours and given no work is owed two. A second required reporting in the same day carries its own two-hour minimum.
- New York. The Miscellaneous Industries wage order requires call-in pay of at least four hours, or the number of hours in the regularly scheduled shift if fewer, at the basic minimum hourly wage.
- Massachusetts. The three-hour rule: an employee scheduled for three or more hours who reports and is sent home early must be paid at least three hours at the minimum wage.
- Connecticut. Rules are set by industry wage order. Restaurant and hotel employees get a two-hour minimum at the regular rate unless told the day before they were not needed. Mercantile workers get a four-hour minimum.
- New Hampshire. At least two hours at the regular rate.
- New Jersey. At least one hour at the usual rate, unless the employee has already worked their agreed hours for the week.
- Rhode Island. At least three hours at the regular rate whenever the employee reports for a scheduled shift.
- District of Columbia. Up to four hours per day, or the scheduled hours if fewer, with worked time at the regular rate and the unworked balance at the minimum wage.
If you run crews across state lines, you do not get to pick one policy. The obligation follows where the work was scheduled. A landscaping company with routes in New Jersey and New York owes different amounts for the same rained-out morning.
The Rain-Day Problem for Field Crews
Reporting time pay reads like a retail concern, but it lands hardest on outdoor trades. Roofing, landscaping, concrete, painting, and exterior construction all schedule crews against a forecast that can turn. When the sky opens after the crew is already on site, that is exactly the sent-home-early scenario the state rules were written for.
California builds in narrow relief. Its wage orders suspend reporting time pay when work cannot begin or continue because of a threat to workers or property, a failure of public utilities, or an act of God such as an earthquake. Whether an ordinary rain delay qualifies is fact-specific and far from automatic, and other states with show-up rules do not all carry the same exceptions. Do not assume weather cancels the obligation. Assume it triggers it unless you have confirmed otherwise for your state.
The practical takeaway is that the sent-home decision is a payroll event, not just a scheduling one. The moment you tell a crew to pack up, you have created a record you may need to defend: who was scheduled, how long they actually worked, and when they left. If that record is a text message and someone's memory, you are guessing at payroll and hoping nobody files a claim.
Where the Money Actually Gets Decided
Every state rule above compares two numbers: the shift the worker was scheduled for and the time they actually worked. The premium is the difference, capped and floored by the state formula. Which means the entire calculation rests on one fact you have to get exactly right, the real worked time.
This is where paper timesheets fall apart. A crew sent home at 9:40 a.m. rarely writes down 9:40. It becomes "about ten," which rounds to a different number of worked hours, which changes whether the half-day math or the minimum floor governs, which changes the check. Multiply that fuzziness across a wet spring and you have a systematic under-recording of exactly the days most likely to draw a wage complaint.
You also still owe overtime on the hours that were worked. A crew that puts in 38 clean hours across the week and then works a partial, rained-out Saturday morning can cross 40, and those minutes are overtime at the regular rate. The show-up premium sits outside that math, but the worked minutes do not. You need both numbers to be exact.
How to Keep the Record Clean With Punch
Punch exists to remove the memory step from all of this. The crew punches in when they reach the site and punches out the instant they are sent home. The start and stop are stamped to the minute, not reconstructed at payroll. When you sit down to apply your state's reporting time rule, you are working from the true worked time, so the scheduled-versus-worked comparison is a fact instead of a guess.
A few details that matter on a sent-home day:
- Exact worked minutes, not rounded ones. Punch records the real punch-in and punch-out, so you know a crew worked 1 hour 47 minutes before the rain, not "about two." That precision is the difference between applying the right floor and shorting someone by accident.
- Worked hours roll into overtime automatically. Every real minute counts toward the weekly threshold, and Punch calculates the overtime premium for you using the overtime presets it ships for more than 60 countries. The partial Saturday that tips a crew over 40 gets handled without a side spreadsheet.
- Punches survive dead zones. A remote job with no signal does not lose the record. Punch queues the punch offline and syncs when service returns, so the morning you got rained off a rural roof is still captured to the minute.
- A manager approves the short day. The sent-home shift lands in the approval queue with the rest of the week. An owner or manager reviews the timestamp, approves or bulk-approves, and the exact record is locked in.
- The whole week exports to payroll or QuickBooks. Worked hours and overtime flow out through the QuickBooks Online integration or a CSV, so the reporting time premium is the only line you add by hand, on top of numbers you can trust.
- A geofence verifies the site, never a camera verifies the worker. Punch confirms an on-site punch-in with GPS, not facial recognition and not a photo at the punch. A crew standing in the rain waiting to be sent home should not also have a camera in their face. Trust beats surveillance.
Punch does not decide your state's reporting time rule for you, and no honest app claims to, because the rule depends on where and how the shift was scheduled. What Punch does is hand you the one input every version of that rule requires: the exact hours the crew actually worked, on the record, ready to defend. Every feature above is on every plan. Pricing is flat per organization, owners are always free, and a rained-out crew never costs you extra per seat the way it would on a per-user competitor.
The Bottom Line
Federal law owes a sent-home worker nothing beyond hours worked. Your state may owe them far more, from one hour in New Jersey to a capped half-day in California, and the amount always turns on the gap between the scheduled shift and the real worked time. The businesses that get burned are the ones running that comparison from memory on the days weather or a canceled job already made chaotic.
Keep exact records and the rest is arithmetic. Punch stamps the true start and stop of every shift, folds the worked hours into overtime, survives the dead zones where field work happens, and gives a manager a clean record to approve. When the sky opens and you send the crew home, you will know to the minute what they worked, and you will be ready to pay exactly what you owe.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Reporting time pay rules vary by state and by industry, and the figures change. Confirm your obligations with an employment attorney or your state labor agency.
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