Jury duty creates stress for employers and employees alike. Here’s how HR can navigate.

Picture this: You open your mailbox, and sandwiched between the bills and flyers is a postcard addressed to you. Cue the warm and fuzzy feeling of getting snail mail. Fewer things make that nostalgia fade faster than discovering the postcard is actually a jury duty summons.

Each year, some 11 million Americans report for in-person for jury duty. The majority will only spend a few days in court, or even less if they’re dismissed during voir dire. But the prospect of missing any amount of work can be a major stressor, particularly if their employer doesn’t offer paid jury duty leave. In fact, of the 9.2% of Americans who admit to lying to get out of jury duty, half said they did so to avoid financial inconvenience, while one-fifth fibbed because they feared consequences from their employer, a 2023 Bar Prep Hero survey found.

While 57% of private sector workers reported having access to paid jury duty leave in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s unclear how many employers currently provide paid jury duty leave beyond what’s required of the jurisdictions in which they operate.

The legal landscape around jury duty leave is complex. Federal law does not require employers to compensate workers for their service, though it does prohibit them from firing, penalizing, or retaliating against employees because of jury duty.

Employers are barred from requiring employees to use accrued PTO for jury duty leave in 18 states, and 10 states and Washington DC require employers pay for at least some amount of employees’ jury duty leave. For example, Colorado requires employers to pay all “regularly employed” workers—including full-time, part-time, and temporary employees—their regular wages up to $50 per day for the first three days of service. Louisiana, meanwhile, requires employers to cover up to one day of employees’ wages for their jury duty leave.

For employers operating in multiple states, navigating these different laws can get messy. They can, however, go above and beyond what state laws dictate, alleviating administrating headaches.

“If you’re a multi-state employer, with this huge patchwork of jury duty [regulations], that becomes hard and complex to manage,” Mary Armstrong-Flippo, area SVP of absence and productivity at consulting firm Gallagher, told HR Brew. “That’s where we see certain employers creating a jury duty leave policy.”

It’s critical that employers who are interested in formalizing a paid leave policy around jury duty understand the laws of the states they operate in.

“The starting place is: What is required in the places where you have employees,” said Jen Passannante, senior counsel at Justworks. “Depending on where employees are, there may be different rules for different locations, and so that’s something to take into account.”