De Minimis Time: What Small Minutes Cost You

De minimis is the legal idea that some work time is too small and irregular to track: a few seconds here, an occasional minute there. It's a real doctrine, and it's much narrower than most employers assume. Regular, measurable minutes are not de minimis, even when each instance is small.

JULY 31, 2026 · BY THE CLOX TEAM

What tends to qualify, and what doesn't

Occasional and administratively hard to capture: a rare after-hours call that takes a minute, a one-time few seconds locking up. Those are the kinds of examples courts have accepted.

Regular and measurable: daily gear loading before the punch, a security check every shift, booting a system each morning, five minutes of cleanup after clock-out every day. These recur, they're measurable, and courts treat them as paid time. California in particular has rejected the federal de minimis defense for regularly occurring minutes.

The math on small minutes

Five minutes a day sounds like nothing. At $26 an hour, five minutes is about $2.17. Across a six-person crew, that's about $13 a day, and across 250 working days it's about $3,250 a year, before overtime effects or penalties. Wage claims are built on exactly this multiplication, applied backward across two or three years.

What to do with this

List the small tasks your crew does outside punches: loading, fueling, securing a site, paperwork. If any happen regularly, move them inside the punches.
Set the expectation that people punch in when work starts, including preparation work, and punch out when it actually ends.
If a task can't practically happen inside punches, pay a fixed paid allowance for it and write the policy down.

The general direction of the law is against ignoring recurring minutes, and the practical fix is cheap: capture them. Exact punch records make the whole question smaller, because the time is recorded when it happens instead of estimated in a deposition.

FAQ

Is there an official de minimis threshold?

No fixed number of minutes. Courts weigh how regular the time is, how practical it was to record, and how much it adds up to.

Does de minimis apply in California?

California courts have largely rejected it for regularly recurring work time. Treat recurring minutes as paid there.

Does rounding make this worse?

It can. Rounding plus untracked edge minutes both trim in the same direction. The rounding guide covers the neutrality requirement.

This is general information, not legal advice.

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