On-call work should be counted under ACA if time is compensable

One of our firm’s clients is a large employer under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), with an employee working 26 hours per week during the day plus two nights per week on-call while at home. It recently asked if it could include the on-call hours to bring her eligibility up to 30 hours. Read on for our answer.

Determining full-time hours

It’s important to determine correctly, as best as you can, whether your employees are considered to be full-time under the ACA and whether you are subject to the Act’s shared responsibility provisions. A full-time employee is one who has worked on average at least 30 hours in a workweek or 130 hours per month.

There always seems to be confusion about the hours that count toward the 30-hours-per-week average. On-call hours are certainly one confusing area, so the question is not unusual. To make sure we are taking about the same thing, on-call hours would be those when an employee must remain available to work during time when she isn’t performing services for the employer.