Illinois employers cannot assume that short preliminary or postliminary tasks fall outside compensable work time, Foley & Lardner cautioned in a recent client alert. The law firm's warning targets a gap between federal and state practice that many payroll and timekeeping systems have quietly absorbed for years.

The alert's core message is blunt: the Illinois Wage Law does not exclude preliminary or postliminary activities from compensable work. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employers have long relied on the principle that minor, hard-to-track tasks before or after a shift — booting up equipment, walking to a workstation, shutting down systems — may count as de minimis and go unpaid. Foley & Lardner's warning signals that Illinois employers who import that federal assumption into state-law compliance do so at their own risk.

What does the warning change for HR teams?

The alert does not create new law. It flags exposure that already exists under the state statute, and it lands on desks that are already recalibrating time-tracking practices. For HR and payroll leaders in Illinois, the practical questions are operational:

• Do current timekeeping rules capture the first and last minutes of non-exempt employees' working time, or do they start the clock at a scheduled shift boundary?
• Are onboarding documents, handbook language and manager training aligned with the state's broader definition of compensable work?
• Have vendors' time-capture settings been configured for the state where the employee works — not merely for federal defaults?

The third question matters most for multi-state employers. A timekeeping configuration tuned to federal de minimis standards can pass an FLSA audit and still leave unpaid-worktime liability under Illinois law. That mismatch is precisely the scenario the firm's alert appears designed to prevent.

Why preliminary and postliminary time matters now

Preliminary and postliminary activities are the tasks employees perform at the edges of a shift: putting on required gear, logging into required systems, security screenings, cleanup. Federal case law has narrowed when such minutes are payable, and payroll software often inherits those defaults. A state statute that reads compensable time more broadly than the FLSA — as Foley & Lardner says Illinois' does for these edge activities — turns those defaults into a compliance gap.

For non-exempt workers, the arithmetic compounds quickly. Minutes that payroll rounds away each shift accumulate across pay periods, and wage-payment statutes typically carry their own remedies, penalties and fee-shifting provisions beyond what federal law offers. Illinois employers facing a claim under the state wage law cannot simply point to federal de minimis reasoning as a defense, on the reading the firm describes.

What should employers do next?

Foley & Lardner's alert functions as a prompt for a state-specific time-audit rather than a wholesale policy rewrite. The lowest-friction first step is mapping where non-exempt work time actually begins and ends — shift boundaries versus system logins versus physical presence at a workstation — and then comparing that map against what the timekeeping system records.

Where the two diverge, HR teams face a choice: adjust capture settings, redesign the edges of shifts so non-compensable tasks are genuinely optional, or pay the difference. Each option carries different cost and employee-relations implications, and multi-state employers will need to apply the Illinois standard selectively rather than uniformly.

With wage-and-hour enforcement and private litigation both active in Illinois, employers should expect the distinction between federal and state compensable-time standards to draw continued attention from plaintiffs' counsel — and from auditors — in the year ahead.