In Lott v. Recker Consulting, the Southern District of Ohio offered a clear answer.
Kiara Lott and 130 of her fellow Patient Care Associates worked from home as call-center reps. Their day started with the familiar remote routine: coffee, logging in, Duo security, VPN, ADP timekeeping, Microsoft Teams, and then opening the phone system and workflow tools to handle patient calls.
They sued under the FLSA, claiming they weren't paid for the minutes spent booting up, logging in, authenticating, and later shutting down. The employer countered that all of that was non-compensable "preliminary" or "postliminary" time.
Here's where the court drew the line:
⏱️ Not compensable: powering on the laptop, entering credentials, dual-authentication, opening ADP, even VPN.
⏱️ Compensable: opening and using the actual tools integral to the job—the softphone, workflow system, client directories, EMR access. The workday starts there. It ends when the last such application is closed.
In other words, for remote workers, pay obligations track the tools actually used to do the job—not merely firing up the machine itself.
Keep in mind: this is just one case, from one federal district court, and it may be an outlier. Other courts (notably the 9th and 10th Circuits) have treated boot-up time in physical call centers as compensable. This court explicitly declined to follow that path, reasoning that "turning on a computer" is too generic—it opens up Reddit just as easily as it opens up Epic. The real test is whether the employee has launched the applications that are integral and indispensable to their principal duties.
Here's my takeaway for employer: Define "Workday Start" and "Workday End" in your policies. Spell out that the paid day begins when employees launch the first integral job-related application and ends when they close the last one. Make sure your handbook and supervisor instructions align. And eliminate mixed signals like "be ready at start time" versus "don't touch anything before your shift."
Courts are only beginning to sketch the contours of "hours worked" when the workplace is the kitchen table. In the remote-work era, wage-and-hour compliance lives and dies by clarity. If you don't define the boundaries of the workday, a court just might do it for you.