The Portal-to-Portal Act treats preliminary and postliminary activities — the things you do before your first real job task and after your last one — as unpaid time under federal law, along with travel to and from the place where you actually work. That default flips in three situations: when the activity is integral and indispensable to your job, when a contract or established workplace custom requires payment, or when the activity falls between your first and last principal activity of the day. Whether you get paid for pre-shift gear changes, post-shift security lines, or morning computer boot-ups turns almost entirely on which side of that line the task lands.
Principal Activities Are the Anchor
Every question under the Portal-to-Portal Act starts with what the statute calls your “principal activity or activities” — the tasks you were hired to do. For a warehouse picker, that’s picking and packing. For a bus driver, it’s driving. You can have more than one: a worker hired to both operate and maintain equipment has two principal activities, and both are compensable.
The category also reaches tasks closely tied to your main duties that you genuinely cannot skip. That is where most disputes live, because the line between “part of my real job” and “something I do before my real job starts” is not always obvious from a job description.
What Preliminary and Postliminary Activities Are
Under 29 U.S.C. § 254(a), your employer owes you nothing for activities that are preliminary (before your first principal activity) or postliminary (after your last principal activity) on a given workday.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 254 – Relief From Liability and Punishment Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Bacon-Davis Act The same section excludes time spent walking, riding, or traveling to the place where you perform your principal activities.
Common unpaid preliminary tasks include waiting in line to pick up tools, swiping a badge at a security desk, or walking from the parking lot to a workstation. On the back end, postliminary tasks might include returning equipment, tidying up, or walking back to the time clock. The statute treats these as bookends to the workday, not part of it. The clock starts at your first real work task and stops at your last one; whatever falls outside that window is generally your own unpaid time under federal law.
When Preliminary or Postliminary Tasks Become Paid
The largest exception to the default came from the Supreme Court. In Steiner v. Mitchell, the Court held that a preliminary or postliminary activity is compensable when it is “an integral and indispensable part of the principal activities for which covered workmen are employed.”2Justia. Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U.S. 247 (1956) An activity that clears this bar is reclassified as a principal activity itself.
Two things have to be true. The task has to be necessary to performing your work, and it has to be something you cannot skip. Chemical plant workers who must shower and change into protective clothing before entering the production area meet both conditions: they literally cannot do their jobs without it. Their changing time is paid.
The test looks at whether the activity is intrinsic to the productive work, not merely whether the employer requires it. The Supreme Court stressed that distinction in Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, warning that “if the test could be satisfied merely by the fact that an employer required an activity, it would sweep into principal activities the very activities that the Portal-to-Portal Act was designed to address.”3Justia. Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014) An employer can require all sorts of things — a dress code, a background check, punctuality — without those requirements converting into paid work.
The Continuous Workday Rule
Once you begin your first principal activity of the day, the Portal-to-Portal Act’s exclusions stop applying until you finish your last one. This is the continuous workday rule. The Supreme Court confirmed in IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez that during this window, walking time, waiting time, and other activities between your first and last principal activities are covered by the FLSA and must be paid.4Legal Information Institute. IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez
Consider a meatpacking plant. If your first principal activity is donning required protective gear at a changing station, the workday starts there. The walk from the changing station to the production floor is now paid, even though ordinary walking would fall under the Portal-to-Portal Act’s travel exclusion. The same logic covers the end of the shift: waiting in line to remove gear falls inside the continuous workday.
The Department of Labor defines the “workday” as the period between the start of the first principal activity and the end of the last one, and it can run beyond your scheduled shift.5U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #22: Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Some employers try to pay only for the scheduled shift and ignore compensable time on either side of it. That is not what the rule says.
Donning and Doffing Protective Gear
Putting on and taking off work gear is the most litigated area under the Act, and the rules split along a real line: ordinary clothing versus protective equipment.
When gear qualifies as protective equipment — mesh aprons, rubber gloves, steel-toed boots for hazardous conditions, hard hats, respirators — the time you spend putting it on and taking it off is paid if it is integral and indispensable to the job. The Department of Labor has drawn a distinction between “clothes” (ordinary apparel) and “protective equipment” (items worn over apparel that are cumbersome in nature and required by law, by the employer, or by the nature of the work).6U.S. Department of Labor. Administrator Interpretation No. 2010-2
For items that count as “clothes,” Section 203(o) of the FLSA lets unions and employers negotiate away pay for changing time through a collective bargaining agreement. In Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp., the Supreme Court defined “clothes” broadly as items “designed and used to cover the body and commonly regarded as articles of dress,” and held that this can include some protective items like flame-retardant pants or heavy jackets.7Justia. Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp., 571 U.S. 220 (2014)
Workers without a union agreement get more straightforward treatment. If your employer requires you to put on protective gear that is integral and indispensable to the job, donning starts your workday, doffing ends it, and everything in between is paid under the continuous workday rule.
Security Screenings
Post-shift security screenings are common in warehouses and distribution centers, and workers often spend real time waiting for them. The Supreme Court settled the federal question in Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, ruling that anti-theft screenings at an Amazon warehouse were not compensable. The reasoning was that warehouse workers are hired to fill orders, and screenings are not “an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities.”3Justia. Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014) The employer could have eliminated the screenings entirely without affecting the workers’ ability to pick and pack orders.
That ruling shut the door on most federal claims for screening time. State laws are another matter, addressed below.
Computer Boot-Up and Login Time
For workers whose entire job runs through software, the question of when the workday begins has moved from the factory floor to the login screen. The Ninth Circuit ruled in Cadena v. Customer Connexx LLC (2022) that call center employees’ boot-up time was compensable because powering up and logging in were integral and indispensable to their principal work. They could not take calls, access customer records, or do anything productive without it.
The logic applies cleanly when the computer itself is the tool you need to do your core job. A call center agent, a data entry clerk, or a remote customer service representative whose work depends on software access has a strong case that startup time is a principal activity. The analysis differs for a construction worker who checks email before heading to a job site — that computer use is incidental, not integral.
For remote workers, the framework is the same. The workday starts with the first principal activity and ends with the last, regardless of whether you sit in an office or at a kitchen table. If logging into required systems is integral and indispensable, that login is where the continuous workday begins.
Travel Time
The Portal-to-Portal Act specifically excludes travel to and from the place where you perform your principal activities.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 254 – Relief From Liability and Punishment Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Bacon-Davis Act Your regular commute is your own time, even if it is long or miserable.
Travel during the workday is different. If a repair technician drives between customer homes during a shift, that travel is paid because it falls within the continuous workday. The same goes for any employer-directed travel between job sites after the first principal activity has started.
Employer-provided vehicles get their own carve-out. Driving a company vehicle home is not automatically compensable. The Department of Labor treats commuting in an employer-provided vehicle as non-compensable when two conditions are met: the travel is within the employer’s normal commuting area, and there is an agreement between the employer and the employee (or the employee’s representative) covering the vehicle’s use.8U.S. Department of Labor. Travel Time Incidental activities tied to using the vehicle for commuting, like picking up supplies on the way in, are also excluded when those conditions hold.
Contract and Custom Exceptions
The Act’s exclusions are not absolute. Section 254(b) provides that even if an activity is technically preliminary or postliminary, your employer still owes you for it when pay is required by a contract or by an established workplace custom.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 254 – Relief From Liability and Punishment Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Bacon-Davis Act
The contract exception covers written and unwritten agreements, including collective bargaining agreements. If your union negotiated pay for pre-shift safety briefings, that time is compensable regardless of what the Portal-to-Portal Act would otherwise allow. The custom-or-practice exception works similarly: an employer that has consistently paid for a particular preliminary activity can be held to that practice even without a formal agreement. A custom cannot override an existing contract that says otherwise.
One limit applies. Compensation under a contract or custom covers only the portion of the day specified. An agreement to pay for a 15-minute pre-shift meeting does not automatically stretch to cover the 10 minutes of walking that precedes it.
The De Minimis Limit
Courts recognize that tiny slivers of time at the edges of a shift can be impractical to track. Under the de minimis doctrine from Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., employers may disregard “insubstantial or insignificant periods of time beyond the scheduled working hours, which cannot as a practical administrative matter be precisely recorded for payroll purposes.”9eCFR. 29 CFR 785.47 – De Minimis Rule The regulation describes this as “uncertain and indefinite periods of time … of a few seconds or minutes duration.”
The threshold is smaller than many employers assume. It is not a blanket pass on the first five or ten minutes of the day. The rule applies only when the time genuinely cannot be recorded as a practical matter, and an employer cannot “arbitrarily fail to count as hours worked any part, however small, of the employee’s fixed or regular working time.” If a task consistently takes a knowable amount of time, the de minimis defense will not save the employer. Courts also look at whether the small periods add up: a few minutes each day, accumulated over weeks or months, can grow into a significant unpaid sum and defeat the defense.
Deadlines and What Is at Stake
Workers who believe they were denied pay for compensable time have two years from the date of each violation to file a claim. If the violation was willful — meaning the employer knew or showed reckless disregard for the law — the deadline extends to three years.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations
An employer who violates the FLSA’s minimum wage or overtime requirements owes the full amount of unpaid wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, effectively doubling the back pay. Willful violations can also carry criminal penalties of up to $10,000 in fines, up to six months of imprisonment, or both.11Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 216 – Penalties The stakes explain why portal-to-portal disputes tend to arrive as class actions covering hundreds or thousands of workers, where a few minutes of unpaid time per shift compounds into serious liability.
State Laws May Reach Further
The Portal-to-Portal Act sets a federal floor, not a ceiling. State wage and hour laws can and sometimes do require pay for activities the federal act excludes. Some states have not adopted the portal-to-portal framework at all, so their courts apply broader definitions of compensable time. Others have declined to adopt the Section 203(o) exception, blocking unions and employers from bargaining away pay for changing clothes. A few treat post-shift security screening time differently than Integrity Staffing allows. Workers in states with stronger protections can pursue state-law claims even where a federal claim would fail, so checking your state’s rules is worth the effort before assuming the federal framework tells the whole story.