One of your best employees walks in holding a jury summons and asks the question every small employer dreads: "Do I still get paid while I'm out?" Your instinct might be that jury duty is the government's business, not yours. But in eight states plus the District of Columbia, the law says otherwise — and even where no state law requires pay, federal wage rules may force your hand for salaried staff anyway. Illinois just joined the pay-required camp with a law signed on July 31, 2026, so if you employ people there, your 2027 payroll budget needs a new line item.
This guide walks through what federal law requires, which states mandate jury-duty pay, the exempt-employee trap that catches employers off guard, and whether you can ask workers to burn PTO instead.
The Federal Baseline: Time Off Yes, Pay No
Start with what applies to you no matter where your business operates. Federal law does not require private employers to pay employees for time spent on jury duty. What it does require is arguably more important: you must give employees time off to serve, and you cannot fire, demote, threaten, or otherwise penalize them for answering a summons or serving on a federal jury.
Every state has its own version of this job protection for state-court service, and most back it with real teeth — civil lawsuits for lost wages, reinstatement orders, fines, and in some states criminal penalties for employers who retaliate. The practical takeaway: "you're fired for missing your shift for jury duty" is unlawful essentially everywhere in the country, even though "you're unpaid for those days" is lawful in most of it.
The court itself pays jurors, but the amounts explain why employees look to you. Federal petit jurors receive 50 dollars per day of attendance, rising to 60 dollars per day on extended trials. State court stipends vary widely, roughly from 5 to 60 dollars a day, with some states paying nothing for the first day or two. Nobody is covering a mortgage on juror pay, which is exactly why state legislatures keep revisiting who should fill the gap.
The States That Make You Pay
A minority of states require private employers to compensate employees during at least part of their jury service. The rules differ enough that a multi-state employer needs a state-by-state policy rather than a single paragraph in the handbook. Here is the current landscape, based on the commonly cited state summaries, with the important 2026 addition at the end:
Full regular pay, no day limit
- Alabama requires employers to pay full-time employees their regular wages for the entire period of jury service.
- Nebraska requires regular pay (minus any court compensation received) with no cap on days.
- Tennessee requires regular wages for the full service and separately bars employers from forcing workers to use vacation or sick leave.
- The District of Columbia requires employers to pay employees their regular wages while serving.
Full or capped pay for the first few days
- Colorado requires regular wages for the first three days of service, capped at 50 dollars per day.
- Connecticut requires full pay for the first five days; after that, the state pays a capped daily amount to jurors whose employers do not continue pay.
- Louisiana requires one day of regular pay for qualifying full-time employees.
- Massachusetts requires regular wages for the first three days of service.
- New York requires employers with more than ten employees to pay 40 dollars per day for the first three days; the state pays 40 dollars per day starting on day four.
The 2026 newcomer: Illinois
On July 31, 2026, Illinois enacted House Bill 4844, amending the Illinois Jury Act and Jury Commission Act. Beginning January 1, 2027, Illinois employers with 26 or more employees must compensate employees at their regular rate of pay for time spent on jury duty. Employers with 25 or fewer employees are exempt. Before this change, Illinois employers of all sizes only had to provide unpaid, job-protected time off.
If you employ more than 25 people in Illinois, this is a genuine payroll-planning item: a two-week trial means two weeks of regular wages per affected employee, starting with your 2027 budget. Multi-state employers should also note the headcount test — confirm with counsel whether it counts Illinois employees only or your national workforce.
A final caution on this list: state legislatures tinker with these statutes regularly, and summaries go stale. Treat the roster above as your starting map, then verify your state's current text (or your employment lawyer's memo) before you finalize policy language.
The FLSA Exempt-Salary Trap
Here is the rule that surprises even experienced owners: in most states you may send an hourly worker home unpaid for jury duty, but you generally cannot dock the salary of an exempt employee for it.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act's salary-basis rule, an exempt employee must receive their full predetermined salary for any week in which they perform any work, with only narrow exceptions — and jury duty is not one of them. The regulation states it plainly: an employer cannot make deductions from an exempt employee's pay for absences caused by jury duty, service as a witness, or temporary military leave.
What the rule does allow is an offset. You may subtract any jury fees the employee received for that week from the salary you owe, without endangering the exemption. In practice the offset is small — a few days of court stipends against a full week's salary — but claiming it is your right, and your policy should say how you handle it (for example, asking employees to endorse the jury-fee check to the company or report the amount to payroll).
Two edge cases worth knowing:
- No work all week, no salary owed. The salary-basis guarantee only applies to weeks in which the employee performs some work. If an exempt employee serves on a jury for an entire workweek and does no work at all — no email, no calls, no "quick check-ins" — you are not required to pay salary for that week. The moment they do any work, the full week's salary (minus the jury-fee offset) is due.
- Partial-week absences still mean full salary. If your exempt manager serves Monday through Wednesday and works Thursday and Friday, you owe the whole week's salary. Docking two days' pay for the jury absence is exactly the violation the rule prohibits, and repeated improper deductions can jeopardize the exemption itself.
The practical consequence: many small businesses end up paying exempt employees for jury duty even in states with no pay mandate, while lawfully leaving hourly workers unpaid. If that asymmetry feels unfair to your hourly team, that is a policy choice you can fix voluntarily — just know the floor the law sets for each group.
Can You Make Them Burn PTO Instead?
In most of the country, this question is up to you: federal law does not stop you from asking employees to use vacation or PTO for jury-duty absences. But fifteen states specifically prohibit employers from requiring workers to substitute paid leave — vacation, sick, personal, or general PTO — for jury service:
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.
In these states you can generally still let an employee choose to use PTO (some workers prefer a full paycheck topped up with leave), but the choice must be theirs. Forcing it, or writing a policy that defaults jury absences against the PTO balance, violates the statute.
Notice the overlap: several states appear on both the must-pay list and the cannot-force-PTO list. In Alabama, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Tennessee, you are both paying regular wages and barred from raiding the leave bank to fund it. Design your handbook accordingly — one generic "jury duty will be charged to PTO" sentence can simultaneously violate two different statutes in those states.
What to Put in Your Jury-Duty Policy
Whether or not your state requires pay, a written policy prevents the awkward ad hoc negotiations that produce inconsistent treatment — and inconsistent treatment is what turns a manageable absence into a discrimination or retaliation claim. Cover these six items:
1. Notice and documentation
Require employees to show you the summons as soon as they receive it and to keep you updated on expected service dates. Most states only require "reasonable notice" from the employee, so keep your rule reasonable too — the summons often arrives with just a few weeks of lead time. Ask for proof of service (the court's attendance certificate) when they return.
2. Pay treatment by employee class
Spell out exactly what happens to compensation: hourly workers (paid or unpaid per your state and your policy), exempt salaried workers (full salary with jury-fee offset), and any voluntary top-up you offer. If you operate in multiple states, either write the strictest version as your company-wide standard or attach a state addendum.
3. Jury-fee handling
Decide in advance what happens to the court's stipend. Common approaches: the employee keeps it (simplest, and effectively a small bonus on top of paid leave), or the employee signs it over so payroll can apply the FLSA offset. Either is fine if it is written down and applied consistently — the disputes start when managers improvise per employee.
4. Benefits and accruals during service
State whether PTO continues to accrue and benefits continue during jury service. Short absences rarely raise issues, but a months-long trial can intersect with leave-accrual caps, waiting periods, and benefits eligibility if your plan documents measure them in hours worked.
5. Return-to-work expectations
Clarify what happens on days the employee is excused early or told not to report — do you expect them at work for the rest of the shift? A reasonable rule ("report to work if excused with more than half your shift remaining") keeps coverage predictable without punishing civic duty.
6. Multi-state coordination
If you have workers in several states, assign ownership of the state-by-state matrix to one person or your payroll provider, with a calendar reminder to re-verify annually. Illinois employers have a hard deadline of January 1, 2027; other states will follow the same direction of travel, and the cost of discovering a new mandate from a wage claim dwarfs the cost of a yearly check.
Track Jury-Duty Pay Like the Distinct Wage Type It Is
Jury-duty pay creates small but real bookkeeping chores that generic "salaries" entries handle poorly. Set up a separate pay code or ledger account for jury-duty wages so you can answer three questions at a glance: how much jury-service time each employee used, what you paid versus what the court paid, and whether offsets were applied correctly for exempt staff.
That separation matters at tax time and in disputes. Jury-duty wages are ordinary taxable wages — withhold income tax, Social Security, and Medicare as usual and report them on the W-2 like any other pay. The court's stipend, if the employee keeps it, is the employee's own income to report, not yours to track. But if your policy routes jury fees back to the company as an offset, record both legs: the salary paid and the fee received, so a later audit or wage inquiry shows the math instead of a suspiciously round salary figure with no paper trail.
Multi-state employers get extra value from clean coding. When Illinois's mandate takes effect, or when your next hire lands in a pay-required state, a dedicated pay code lets you pull the exact cost of compliance by state — useful both for budgeting and for demonstrating that every covered employee was actually paid.
If your books live in scattered spreadsheets, this is the kind of small complexity that quietly becomes a big mess. Plain-text accounting in Beancount.io keeps every pay code, offset, and state-specific rule visible in version-controlled text you can search and audit — and the docs walk through structuring payroll accounts from scratch.
Keep Your Payroll Records Organized From Day One
Jury duty is one of those obligations that arrives without warning and tests whether your policies and your books are ready. A clear policy aligned to your states' rules, plus payroll records that separate jury-duty wages and offsets from ordinary salary, turns a summons from a scramble into a routine. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
