The Department has received questions from the public regarding whether and when home care workers must be paid for time they spend sleeping. In response to these questions, we created the guidance on this page. The guidance describes the broadly applicable rules governing under what circumstances an employer may exclude sleep time from an employee’s hours worked under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and, if exclusion is permissible, how many hours may be excluded. The guidance provides explanations and examples from the domestic service context.
