Human Resource Blog

Paying Employees While They are Serving Jury Duty

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We are a small company and have just had an employee be called away for jury duty. She has been gone now for over a month and we are still paying her full salary and benefits. Do we legally have to continue to pay her while she is gone?

No you do not. However, you should keep in mind that your employee did not volunteer for jury duty. Limiting or cutting off her pay simply because she is serving her country on jury duty could send a bad message to the other employees in your company. While companies are allowed to legally restrict the number of days that an employee can take off for jury duty, your employee morale could be drastically decreased if you do punish an employee by docking her salary while she is on jury duty.

Both you and your employees have rights that are protected by the Jury Systems Improvement Act. This Act is a federal document that is in place in order to protect your employees from being terminated or disciplined while they serve on jury duty. However, the Act also states that employers cannot limit the number of days that employees can take off while on jury duty, but you can determine which of those days your employees can still receive pay.

Now, you did not mention which state your company is in, but some states have their own laws when it comes to jury duty leave days. For example, in some states, employers must pay their employees for a certain amount of jury duty leave days. Therefore, before you dock the pay for your employee, make sure that you check with the Department of Labor or the Courts system in your state for more information. You can generally find this information by calling the courts directly or by checking the Web sites for the respective organizations.

In some cases, employees have claimed that they are away serving jury duty, but they are not. Therefore, if you are paying for an employee that claims to be away on jury duty, you may want to consider establishing a policy stating that employees need to provide you with documentation to prove that they were away on jury duty. They can do this by simply obtaining a confirmation letter from the clerk of the courts each day that they go into the courts. Make sure that the letter states which hours they were in court; if you have an employee that served jury duty in the morning, you should expect that the employee would come to work in the afternoon.