Paying Dental Staff for Training, Meetings, Travel and On-Call Time

If attendance is required, the time is paid.

Under the FLSA, work not requested but suffered or permitted is work time: when the practice knows or has reason to believe an employee is working, that time must be counted.

Mapped onto a schedule: the huddle before the first patient, the case-review meeting over lunch and the all-staff meeting after closing are hours worked for non-exempt staff when attendance is required or effectively compulsory — the test for “optional” is just below.

The FLSA workday generally runs from the start to the end of the employee's principal activities, so it can be longer than the scheduled shift — a huddle before the schedule starts extends the paid day at the front end, and those minutes feed the week's total where overtime rules take over.

“Optional” has a strict meaning.

Attendance is not voluntary if the employer requires it — or if the employee is given to understand, or led to believe, that their working conditions or the continuance of their employment would be adversely affected by not attending.

A meeting announced as voluntary but scheduled so that skipping it means missing case assignments may not be voluntary in fact.

A written rule against off-the-clock work is not a defense on its own.

Federal rules are blunt: the mere promulgation of a rule against such work is not enough — management must enforce it and cannot accept the benefit of the work without paying for it.

If huddles keep happening before anyone clocks in, the practice is accepting that benefit every morning.

Time at lectures, meetings and training programs is working time unless every one of four federal criteria is met: it falls outside the employee's regular working hours, attendance is truly voluntary, it is not directly related to their job, and the employee performs no productive work during it.

DOL's summary reads the same way — outside normal hours, voluntary, not job related, and no other work performed at the same time.

Miss one criterion and the time is paid.

What the prongs mean in a practice:

• Truly voluntary. Not voluntary if you require attendance, or if the employee is led to believe that not attending would hurt their working conditions or their job.
• Not directly related to the job. Training is directly related when it is designed to make the employee handle their current job more effectively, as opposed to training for another job or a new skill. Clinical CE that sharpens the skills someone uses chairside is designed to make them better at their current job, so it fails this prong — and with one criterion failed, the time is paid unless one of the two own-initiative carve-outs below applies.
• Advancement is the exception. A course set up to prepare an employee for advancement to a higher-skilled job, rather than to make them more efficient in the present one, is not considered directly related — even if it incidentally improves current skills. That is one narrow route to unpaid time under the four-part test, and it still has to pass the other three criteria.
• No productive work. A team member who answers the schedule phone during a webinar is working, whatever the webinar covers.

Two provisions cover courses you do not send anyone to.

If an employee, on their own initiative, attends an independent school, college or trade school after hours, the time is not hours worked even if the courses relate to their job.

And voluntary after-hours attendance at a program you run that corresponds to courses offered by independent bona fide schools is not hours worked either — even if it is directly related to the job or you pay for the course.

License-renewal CE is the gray area, so handle it honestly.

The federal regulation does not address whether state-mandated license-renewal CE that the practice requires counts as the employee's “own initiative,” and our research found no DOL opinion letter on dental CE.

Do not assume the time is unpaid: set your answer in writing, and confirm the treatment with employment counsel before it comes off a paycheck.

The commute stays free: normal travel from home to work is not work time, whether the employee works at a fixed site or at different job sites.

Beyond the commute, each piece of a course day has its own rule.

Travel during the workday as part of the employee's principal activity must be counted as hours worked — the regulation's own example is travel from job site to job site, which covers an assistant driving between your two offices mid-day.

And when an employee who normally works at one location is sent on a special one-day assignment in another city — a course across the state, say — the travel to and from is work time; you may deduct only the time they would normally spend commuting to their regular work site, plus their usual meal time.

Overnight trips follow the employee's normal hours.

Travel away from home is work time when it cuts across the employee's normal working hours — including the corresponding hours on a non-working day, so the Saturday hours that match a usual weekday schedule are paid.

Under DOL's enforcement policy, time spent in travel away from home outside regular working hours as a passenger on an airplane, train, boat, bus or automobile is not counted, and neither is the regular meal period.

The carve-outs stop there: any work an employee is required to perform while traveling counts as hours worked, and an employee who drives a vehicle is working while driving.

If you offer the option of public transportation and the employee chooses to drive instead, you may count either the time spent driving or the time you would have had to count for the public conveyance during working hours.

Work done on the trip counts wherever it happens: if the practice knows or has reason to believe an employee is working away from the office — even at home — the time must be counted as hours worked.

On-call time turns on how much of the hour actually belongs to the employee.

An employee who is required to remain on call on the employer's premises — or so close to them that they cannot use the time effectively for their own purposes — is working while on call.

An employee who is merely required to leave word where they can be reached is not working in most cases, though DOL notes that additional constraints on the employee's freedom could make the time compensable.

The tighter your response expectations — how fast they must answer, how far they may go — the closer the arrangement moves toward paid time.

Waiting on site is its own category.

An employee who is engaged to wait — idle between patients, or waiting on a late patient — is working during that idle time, because the waiting is an integral part of the job.

For a gap to be genuinely unpaid it has to be real off-duty time: the employee is completely relieved from duty, told in advance they may leave and when to return, and the period is long enough to use effectively for their own purposes.

California adds two rules, and both sit in IWC Wage Order 4 — the wage order the California Labor Commissioner lists for dental offices.

Reporting-time pay: an employee who reports for a scheduled shift but is furnished less than half of it must be paid for half the usual or scheduled day's work, no less than 2 hours and no more than 4, at their regular rate — the rule that bites when a full morning of patients cancels and staff are sent home.

Call-back pay: an employee required to report a second time in one workday who is furnished less than 2 hours of work on the second reporting must be paid for 2 hours.

California's wage order also defines hours worked as the time during which an employee is subject to the employer's control, including all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so.

Keep two questions separate: who pays for the course, and is the time paid.

Different rules answer them.

Paying a registration fee does not decide the time question in either direction — the four-part test does.

Voluntary after-hours attendance at a qualifying independent-school-style program is not hours worked even when the employer pays for the course; conversely, a required in-service on your new sterilization protocol is paid time whether or not a fee was involved.

What you cannot do is let a training charge cut into the federal wage floor.

Under the FLSA, wages must be paid free and clear: the wage requirements are not met where the employee kicks back, directly or indirectly to the employer or to another person for the employer's benefit, the whole or part of the wage delivered to them.

A charge for required training or a deduction for course costs cannot cut a non-exempt employee's pay below the minimum wage or the overtime already owed.

Beyond that federal floor, deduction rules are state-specific — confirm any arrangement with your state labor agency or employment counsel before it goes in the handbook.

So decide in order: whether the time is paid under the four-part test, then who bears the fee, travel and materials.

Requiring a course and paying both the time and the fee is the clean combination; paying the fee for a genuinely voluntary, after-hours course can still leave the time unpaid.

What varies is the money.

The duty to count compensable time does not.

Write the rules down, then make payroll and timekeeping match them.

Federal rules accept an off-the-clock ban only when management actually enforces it, so a policy that coexists with unpaid huddles is a record of non-enforcement.

Approval rules have limits too: an announcement that overtime will not be paid unless authorized in advance does not remove the right to pay for overtime hours actually worked, and the overtime requirement cannot be waived by agreement.

Approval rules manage the schedule — they do not decide the pay.

A quick reference for the policy:

States can add rules the federal floor does not have — California's reporting-time pay above is one example — so have employment counsel or your state labor agency's guidance confirm the final version before it goes live.

Where this fits into the rest of hiring — pay structures, screening, offers — the dental hiring hub collects our employer guides.