Jury Duty Leave: Do You Have to Use PTO?

Do you have to use PTO for jury duty? As the employer, you generally may require it under federal law, but at least ten states specifically forbid it, and for anyone on your payroll paid as exempt the question is close to academic because you cannot dock their salary for the absence anyway.

That answer surprises most small employers, because the instinct is to treat a summons like any other absence and let the balance absorb it. Jury duty is not like any other absence. It is a court order, it carries its own protective statutes, and the rules land differently on a salaried manager than on somebody paid by the hour.

I run FirstHR, which builds people and records tooling for businesses without a dedicated HR person, and jury summonses are one of those small events that reliably produce a bad improvised decision. This covers the pay question, the PTO question, the state rules with statutes attached, the fee offset, and a policy you can adopt this week. It is general information rather than legal advice.

Can You Require PTO for Jury Duty?

No federal statute prevents it, and in the states with no rule on the point an employer may lawfully charge jury service to an accrued PTO balance. In at least ten states that same decision is a statutory violation, and in every state it is a bad idea for a salaried exempt employee.

The confusion usually starts with a single sentence somebody read online saying jury duty is unpaid. That sentence describes federal wage law and hourly employees. It says nothing about the state statutes, and it is wrong about exempt employees.

Does Jury Duty Have to Be Paid?

For hourly employees, federal law says no. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires payment for hours worked, and jury service is not hours worked, which the Department of Labor states directly in its guidance on jury duty. Nine jurisdictions override that with their own pay requirement, and exempt employees follow a completely different rule.

The practical effect is that a single unpaid policy applied across your whole team is almost certainly wrong somewhere. Most small employers I talk to end up paying the first few days for everybody, which costs little and removes the entire problem.

The Salary Basis Rule Settles It for Exempt Staff

An employer cannot make deductions from an exempt employee salary for absences caused by jury duty, attendance as a witness or temporary military leave. That is the text of the salary basis regulation at 29 CFR 541.602, and it is the single most useful thing to know here.

Run it through a real week. Your operations lead is summoned Monday, seated on a jury, and sits Monday through Thursday. She answers email Friday morning. That is a partial-week absence, she performed work, and full salary is due for the week. Charging four days to her PTO balance is a deduction dressed in different clothes.

The one exception is a workweek in which the employee performs no work at all. Exempt employees need not be paid for such a week, which is why a long trial can eventually become unpaid. In practice that requires genuinely zero work, and one answered message during the week ends the argument.

States That Require Paid Jury Leave

Nine jurisdictions require an employer to pay something for jury service, and no two of them require the same thing. The amount ranges from a single day of regular wages in Louisiana to the first five days in Connecticut.

Several of these carry conditions worth reading before you rely on the summary. Colorado extends its requirement to part-time, temporary and casual employment where the hours can be determined from a schedule or established practice, and Massachusetts does the same.

Three of them exempt the smallest employers. New York, Tennessee and the District of Columbia each set a threshold below which the payment obligation does not apply, so a very small team may fall outside the requirement entirely. Connecticut defines a full-time employed juror by weekly hours rather than by job title, which catches people employers assume are part-time.

New York is the one that changed most recently. The daily juror fee rose from $40 to $72 effective June 8, 2025, and employers above the statutory threshold pay that daily rate for the first three days of service.

States That Ban Requiring PTO

At least ten states prohibit an employer from making an employee use accrued leave for jury service, and most of them prohibit requesting it too. The wording matters: asking nicely is also barred in the states that use the phrase require or request.

None of these statutes forces you to create a PTO benefit you do not otherwise offer. Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Utah all include the same saving clause: nothing in the section requires an employer to provide leave to employees who are not otherwise entitled to it under company policy.

The penalties are real rather than theoretical. Oklahoma makes requiring the use of leave a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, Mississippi treats a violation as interference with the administration of justice punishable as contempt of court, and Arizona, Nevada and Virginia all attach criminal penalties to their jury duty provisions.

An employee may still volunteer to use PTO, and in a state with no pay requirement some will prefer that to an unpaid day. The distinction is who initiates it. Offering the option in writing is fine; putting it in the policy as the default is what gets employers into trouble.

The Jury Fee Offset

If you pay wages for a day the court also pays a fee for, most rules let you keep the fee whole by offsetting it against the wages due. The salary basis regulation says so explicitly for exempt employees, and several state statutes say so for everybody.

Federal petit jurors receive $50 a day, rising to as much as $60 a day after ten days of service if the presiding judge orders it, according to the federal judiciary. Grand jurors follow the same $50 rate with the increase available after forty-five days. State courts pay their own rates, which are usually lower.

Honestly, for a small team the administrative cost of collecting a $50 check usually exceeds the $50. I stopped bothering. If you do collect it, say so in the policy in advance, because a surprise deduction on a later paycheck reads as a punishment for serving.

What Federal Law Actually Protects

Federal law protects the job, not the paycheck. Under 28 U.S.C. 1875, no employer may discharge, threaten to discharge, intimidate or coerce any permanent employee by reason of that employee serving or being summoned to serve on a federal grand or petit jury.

The remedies are the part employers underestimate. A court may award lost wages and benefits, order reinstatement, grant injunctive relief, award attorney fees, impose a civil penalty of not more than $5,000 for each violation as to each employee, and order the employer to perform community service.

Note the word threaten. You do not have to fire anybody to violate the statute. Telling a supervisor to make it clear that a summons would be inconvenient is enough to create exposure, and it is the version of this that actually happens at small companies under deadline pressure.

State jury service sits outside 28 U.S.C. 1875 and is covered by state statutes instead, which is why nearly every state has its own protective provision. Most state summonses are state court summonses, so in practice both layers apply across your workforce. Jury leave belongs in the same policy family as the other types of leave you are obliged to grant.

Writing a Jury Duty Pay Policy

A usable policy answers five questions in under a page: notice, pay, PTO, the court fee and partial days. Write it once at the most generous standard that applies anywhere you operate, and you will never have to maintain a per-state matrix.

Store the summons copy and the attendance certificate with the employee record rather than in a manager inbox. If your employee handbook is where this policy lives, make sure the version employees can actually reach matches the one payroll is working from.

Scheduling and Coverage

Several states restrict how you may schedule around jury service, and the restrictions are more specific than most employers expect. They govern the hours immediately before and after a court appearance rather than the absence itself.

Nevada bars scheduling work within eight hours before a jury appearance, and where service lasted four hours or more, bars work between 5 p.m. that day and 3 a.m. the following morning. Virginia has a similar restriction for appearances of four or more hours. Michigan prohibits requiring hours that, combined with jury service, exceed what the employee normally works.

For coverage, the honest planning assumption is a short absence, because only a fraction of any panel is seated and the rest are released once selection ends. Plan for the short case as the norm and treat a seated multi-week trial as the exception that needs a real conversation about temporary cover rather than an absence policy. Where the absence does run long and turns unpaid, it becomes a form of unpaid time off with statutory job protection attached.

Where Small Employers Get This Wrong

Five patterns, and the first two account for most of the actual liability.

Docking an exempt employee for a partial-week jury absence is first, and it is the one that can cost the most, because a pattern of improper deductions can defeat the exemption for a whole job classification rather than just refunding one paycheck.

Charging the time to PTO in a state that prohibits it is second. Employers rarely check, because the decision feels administrative rather than legal, and in ten states it is a statutory violation, with most of those states attaching a misdemeanor charge or contempt of court to it.

Treating the summons as negotiable is third. Asking an employee to seek a postponement because the quarter is busy is exactly the conduct 28 U.S.C. 1875 describes when it says intimidate or coerce, even when nobody intends it that way.

Applying a single unpaid rule nationwide is fourth. It is wrong in nine jurisdictions on the pay side, wrong in ten on the PTO side, and wrong for every exempt employee anywhere.

And keeping the court fee without saying so in advance is last. It is often lawful and always resented when it appears as an unexplained line on a paycheck weeks later.

If you want the wider picture of which absences you are obliged to grant and which are discretionary, the statutory benefits overview covers the mandatory side, and jury leave sits firmly in it.

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