Charting After Your Shift Ends? Here's When That Time Is Actually Paid

pay-benefits

You clock out at the scheduled time, because that's what the schedule says, and then you sit in the break room or at the nurses' station for another fifteen or twenty minutes finishing notes nobody had time for during the shift. It doesn't feel like "working." It feels like cleanup. Payroll usually doesn't see it either way — because nobody clocked it.

There's an actual legal answer to whether that time is supposed to be paid, and it doesn't turn on how the time felt. It turns on whether your employer knew the work was happening and let it continue.

The rule: "suffered or permitted" work counts

The Fair Labor Standards Act doesn't require that work be ordered to count as paid time. Under 29 CFR § 785.11, work that wasn't formally requested but that the employer allowed to happen is still working time:

"Work not requested but suffered or permitted is work time... The employer knows or has reason to believe that [the employee] is continuing to work and the time is working time."

The regulation gives charting-adjacent examples almost directly: an employee who stays to "finish an assigned task," "correct errors," or "prepare time reports or other records" after the shift is still working, and why they're doing it doesn't change that.

The companion section, 29 CFR § 785.13, puts the responsibility on the employer, not the employee, to stop it if they don't want to pay for it:

"It is the duty of management to exercise its control and see that the work is not performed if it does not want it to be performed. It cannot sit back and accept the benefits without compensating for them."

In plain terms: a policy that says "no charting off the clock" doesn't settle anything by itself if, in practice, staff are still finishing notes after punch-out and management knows it's happening. The regulation cares about what's actually occurring on the floor, not what the handbook says should happen.

The exception that gets misused: "de minimis" time

Employers do have one real exception, and it's worth knowing precisely because it's also the thing that gets stretched past what it covers. 29 CFR § 785.47 allows truly trivial stretches of time to be disregarded:

"Insubstantial or insignificant periods of time beyond the scheduled working hours, which cannot as a practical administrative matter be precisely recorded for payroll purposes, may be disregarded... This rule applies only where there are uncertain and indefinite periods of time involved of a few seconds or minutes duration."

That same regulation is explicit that it does not cover regularly recurring chunks of time: an employer "may not arbitrarily fail to count as hours worked any part, however small, of the employee's fixed or regular working time... he is regularly required to spend on duties assigned to him."

Courts have drawn the line with more precision than the regulation itself does. The Ninth Circuit's test in Lindow v. United States (9th Cir. 1984) 738 F.2d 1057 looks at three things: (1) the practical administrative difficulty of recording the time, (2) the total amount of compensable time at stake, and (3) whether the extra work happens regularly. Under that case's own review of prior rulings, roughly ten minutes a day sits near the edge of what courts have been willing to call de minimis — and the more regular and predictable the extra time is, the weaker the case for disregarding it, even when each individual stretch is short.

California has gone further. In Troester v. Starbucks Corp. (2018) 5 Cal.5th 829, the California Supreme Court held that California's wage-and-hour statutes don't adopt the FLSA's de minimis doctrine for work that happens regularly, like this — an employee there was owed pay for routinely working several minutes off the clock closing the store, and the "it's too small to bother with" defense wasn't available under California law even though it might have applied under federal law alone. (The court left open whether a truly brief, irregular stretch that is hard to record could still be disregarded.) If you're in California, don't assume the federal de minimis threshold is the one that applies to you; check whether your state has adopted something stricter.

The worked numbers

Say your regular rate is $34/hour, and you routinely spend 20 minutes after three shifts a week finishing charting that didn't get done on the clock.

That's the straight-time version. If those same 60 minutes push a week that was already at 40 hours into 41, the math changes, because that hour isn't a straight-time hour anymore — it's an overtime hour:

Twenty minutes, three times a week, is also well past the "few seconds or minutes" and "uncertain and indefinite" language that § 785.47 uses to describe time that can be disregarded — and it's regular, not occasional, which is the exact factor Lindow weighs most heavily against an employer trying to call it trivial. None of that guarantees a specific outcome for a specific case; it just means the "it's only a few minutes, that doesn't count" answer isn't something the regulation itself actually says.

What to check against your own routine

  1. Does your facility have a way to record post-clock-out work at all — a paper addendum, an "exception time" code, a supervisor sign-off — or is the only option to either clock back in (which some systems make deliberately clunky) or not record it?
  2. Is the extra time closer to a genuinely occasional two or three minutes, or a predictable chunk most shifts? The regulation and the case law both treat those very differently.
  3. Does anyone with authority over your schedule know this is happening? § 785.13 puts the burden on management to stop unwanted work, not on you to have asked permission for each minute.
  4. If your employer's own time records don't reflect this work, are you keeping any record of your own? Under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), when an employer's records are inadequate, an employee's own reasonable estimate can be enough to establish a claim — which is a reason to jot down dates and approximate minutes as you go, not to wait until it's a dispute to try to remember.
  5. Do you know which state's law applies to you, and whether it's stricter than the federal floor — the way California's is?

None of this is a verdict on your specific situation. Whether particular minutes are compensable depends on facts a blog post can't see: your state's law, your employer's actual policies and practices, and how consistently the extra time happens. If real money is on the table, your state labor department, a union representative, or an employment attorney is the right next step — not a general explainer.

Where the schedule comes in

The honest reason this kind of time is easy to lose track of is that it's not on the schedule anywhere. The twelve-hour shift is the thing everyone plans around; the twenty minutes after it isn't a line item on anyone's calendar, which is exactly why it's easy for an employer to under-notice and easy for you to under-track.

Duty Pals doesn't log your clock times, but it does keep your actual rotation — the pattern of shifts, stretches, and how the weeks stack up — visible far enough ahead that you can see which weeks are already going to run long before you're the one staying late to finish the notes. Duty Pals is currently in pre-registration; you can sign up to be notified when it launches.

This article explains general FLSA concepts and is not legal advice. Whether specific time is compensable depends on facts specific to your job, your employer's policies, and your state's law — some states, including California, apply a stricter rule than the federal de minimis exception for regularly recurring time. Your state labor department, your union representative, or an employment attorney is the right resource for a specific dispute.

Sources: 29 CFR § 785.11 · 29 CFR § 785.13 · 29 CFR § 785.47 · DOL Fact Sheet #22: Hours Worked Under the FLSA · Lindow v. United States (9th Cir. 1984) 738 F.2d 1057 · Troester v. Starbucks Corp. (2018) 5 Cal.5th 829 · Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946)