Employee Time Card Laws: Hours Worked, Recordkeeping, and Penalties

Employee time card laws come from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires employers to keep accurate records of the hours worked by non-exempt employees, pay for every hour those employees actually work, and preserve the underlying records for years afterward. States often add their own requirements on top. When employers get it wrong, whether through sloppy records, illegal rounding, or outright manipulation, they owe double the unpaid wages plus attorney’s fees, and willful violators face fines and possible jail time.

Who the Rules Cover

The FLSA’s detailed timekeeping requirements apply to non-exempt employees: hourly workers and most salaried workers earning below the federal salary threshold for exemption. If you’re properly classified as exempt (typically salaried managers, professionals, or administrators above the salary threshold), your employer still keeps basic employment records like your name, address, and salary, but doesn’t have to track your daily hours the same way.¹

Misclassification matters here. If you’ve been told you’re “salaried” and therefore don’t need to track hours, but your actual job duties don’t meet the exemption tests, your employer is still legally required to keep time records for you and pay overtime when you exceed 40 hours in a week. The label your employer uses doesn’t decide the question; your duties and salary level do.

What Employers Must Record

The FLSA doesn’t require a specific timekeeping method. Punch clocks, digital apps, handwritten logs, and spreadsheets all work if the system captures accurate, complete data. What the law does require is that employers maintain a specific set of records for every non-exempt employee:¹

Full name, Social Security number, address, birth date if under 19, sex, and occupation.
The day and time the employee’s workweek begins.
Total hours worked each day and each workweek.
How wages are calculated (for example, “$17 per hour” or “piecework”).
Regular hourly rate, total straight-time earnings, and total overtime earnings for each workweek.
Every addition to or deduction from wages.
Total wages paid each pay period and the date of payment.

Many states go further. Some require employers to record meal break start and end times. Others require employees to sign timesheets weekly. Because rules vary, check with your state’s labor department for anything extra that applies where you work.

What Counts as Hours Worked

Most time card disputes start here. The FLSA defines “employ” as “to suffer or permit to work,” meaning any time your employer knows or should know you’re working is compensable, period.² That principle has several practical consequences.

Unauthorized Overtime

An employer can’t refuse to pay for overtime just because it wasn’t approved in advance. If you stayed late to finish a project and your manager saw you doing it, those hours are compensable even where company policy says overtime requires pre-authorization. The employer can discipline you for breaking the policy, but they still have to pay you.³ An announcement that unauthorized overtime “will not be paid” does not override the law.

Training and Meetings

Time spent at lectures, meetings, and training programs counts as hours worked unless all four of these conditions are met: the session takes place outside normal working hours, attendance is truly voluntary, the content isn’t directly related to your job, and you don’t perform any other work during the session.² If even one condition isn’t satisfied, the time is compensable. Mandatory safety training during your lunch break, for instance, fails the voluntary test and must be paid.

Travel Time

Your regular commute from home to a fixed workplace isn’t compensable. Travel between job sites during the workday is. So is travel for a special one-day assignment in another city, minus your normal commute time. Overnight travel that falls during your regular working hours is compensable even on days you’d normally be off.²

Pre-Shift and Post-Shift Activities

Putting on required safety gear, booting up a mandatory computer system, or going through a required security screening can all be compensable when they’re integral to your principal work activity. Courts have consistently held that donning and doffing required protective equipment is paid time. If your employer requires it and it takes more than a trivial amount of time, it belongs on the clock.

Remote Work

The “suffer or permit to work” standard doesn’t disappear when someone works from home. If a non-exempt remote employee checks and responds to work emails at 9 p.m. and the employer knows or has reason to know about it, that time is compensable.² There is a narrow federal exception for “de minimis” time covering truly trivial intervals that are administratively difficult to track, but some states reject that exception entirely. An employer who tells remote workers not to report after-hours work while sending late-night emails expecting responses is building a liability case.

Rounding and Automatic Meal Deductions

Federal regulations let employers round punch times to the nearest five minutes, six minutes, or quarter-hour.⁴ The most common version is the “7-minute rule”: clock in 1 to 7 minutes past the quarter-hour and time rounds down; clock in 8 to 14 minutes past and it rounds up.⁵

Rounding is only legal if it averages out so that employees are fully compensated for all hours actually worked. An employer who consistently rounds down at clock-in and rounds down again at clock-out is shaving minutes from every shift. Over a workweek that adds up, and a rounding pattern that systematically favors the employer violates the FLSA even though rounding itself is permitted.⁵

Federal law doesn’t require employers to offer breaks. But when breaks are provided, short rest breaks of about 20 minutes or less are paid work time, and bona fide meal periods of 30 minutes or longer can be unpaid only when the employee is completely relieved of all duties.² Eat at your desk and answer phones and that’s not a bona fide meal period; it has to be paid.

Many payroll systems automatically deduct 30 minutes for lunch every shift. Problems multiply here. If you routinely work through lunch or get called back to your station after 15 minutes, the automatic deduction keeps docking time you actually worked. Employers using auto-deductions need a reliable way for employees to override the deduction on days the break was interrupted or skipped. Without one, the employer owes back pay.⁶

How Long Records Are Kept

Employers must preserve general payroll records, including the detailed employee data listed above, for at least three years from the date of last entry. Supporting records like time cards, daily start and stop times, work schedules, and wage rate tables must be kept for at least two years.⁷

Records must be kept safe and accessible at the workplace or a central recordkeeping office. When stored centrally, they must be made available within 72 hours of a request from a Department of Labor representative.⁷ Your right to view your own records is largely governed by state law, with response deadlines typically running from about one to three weeks.

Fixing a Time Card Error

An employer may legitimately correct a time card to fix a genuine mistake, like when you forgot to clock out. Altering records to reduce reported hours, avoid overtime, or shave minutes off shifts is illegal. Any manipulation that leaves an employee underpaid violates the FLSA, whether the employer calls it a correction or an adjustment.

Start by comparing your pay stub against your own records for the period in question. Pin down specific dates, hours, or rates that are wrong. A vague complaint gets a vague response; “I worked 8.5 hours on March 12 but was paid for 8” gives payroll something concrete to fix.

Notify your supervisor or HR in writing. Email is ideal because it timestamps itself. State the error, attach your documentation, and request a correction by a specific date. Most payroll departments can issue corrections on the next regular pay cycle when alerted promptly.

If the error isn’t corrected after a reasonable follow-up, you can file a complaint with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division by calling 1-866-487-9243 or visiting your nearest WHD office. Complaints are confidential and your employer isn’t told who filed.⁸ You also have the right to file a private lawsuit without going through the DOL first.

If you suspect your records have already been altered, informal evidence helps. Calendar entries, text messages, and emails showing when you arrived and left can establish hours worked. Courts have allowed employee testimony and personal logs to fill the gap when an employer failed to keep proper records.

Retaliation Is Prohibited

Federal law bars employers from firing, demoting, cutting hours, or otherwise punishing an employee for raising a time card or wage complaint. The protection applies whether you file a formal complaint with the Department of Labor, raise the issue internally with a manager or HR, or testify in someone else’s wage case.⁹

Oral and written complaints are both covered, and most courts have held that internal complaints to an employer are protected activity even when you never contact a government agency.⁹ Remedies for retaliation include reinstatement, lost wages, and an additional equal amount in liquidated damages. Protection extends to former employees, so an employer can’t give you a bad reference in retaliation for a wage complaint.

Penalties and How Long You Have to File

An employer who violates the FLSA’s minimum wage or overtime requirements owes the full amount of unpaid wages plus an additional equal amount in liquidated damages. In practice, that’s double the back pay.¹⁰ Courts also award reasonable attorney’s fees, so pursuing a claim doesn’t have to come out of the employee’s pocket.

Repeated or willful violations of minimum wage or overtime rules expose the employer to civil fines of up to $2,515 per violation, assessed by the Department of Labor.¹¹ The figure adjusts annually for inflation, so check the DOL’s current penalty schedule for the latest number.

Willful violations can also lead to criminal prosecution, with fines up to $10,000 and imprisonment of up to six months. A second criminal conviction under the same provision can carry jail time.¹⁰

You have two years from the date of each violation to file a claim for unpaid wages. If the violation was willful, the deadline extends to three years.¹² Each short paycheck potentially starts its own clock. A pattern of shaving 15 minutes per shift over two years can amount to dozens of individual violations, each with its own deadline, so don’t assume that because the problem started long ago it’s too late to act on the recent ones.

1
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 21 – Recordkeeping Requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
2
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 23 – Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA
4
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 785 – Hours Worked
5
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet – The Health Care Industry and Hours Worked
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Breaks and Meal Periods
7
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 516 – Records to Be Kept by Employers
8
U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a Complaint
9
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 77A – Prohibiting Retaliation Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 216 – Penalties
11
U.S. Department of Labor. Civil Money Penalty Inflation Adjustments
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations