FLSA Recordkeeping: What You Must Keep, and for How Long

Recordkeeping is the least interesting obligation in wage and hour law and the one that decides most disputes. Not because bad records are illegal in themselves — the penalty for that is modest — but because when an employer's records are incomplete, the burden of proving hours worked shifts, and the employee's own account starts to win.

A product-focused treatment of attendance records is available in the website.

The controlling federal recordkeeping text is the federal recordkeeping regulations in 29 CFR Part 516.

General information, not legal advice. Requirements vary by state, and many states impose more than the federal minimum. Take advice from employment counsel.

What the law requires

The FLSA's recordkeeping regulations at 29 CFR Part 516 require employers to keep, for each non-exempt employee:

Identifying information - Full name and Social Security number - Address including ZIP code - Birth date, if the employee is under 19 - Sex and occupation

Time and pay - Time and day of week when the employee's workweek begins - Hours worked each day - Total hours worked each workweek - Basis on which wages are paid — hourly, weekly, piecework - Regular hourly pay rate - Total daily or weekly straight-time earnings - Total overtime earnings for the workweek - All additions to or deductions from wages - Total wages paid each pay period - Date of payment and the pay period covered

That is the federal minimum. The most commonly missed items are not the obvious ones — they are the start of the workweek and the basis on which wages are paid, which employers assume are implicit.

How long to keep it

Three years for payroll records, collective bargaining agreements, and sales and purchase records.

Two years for the records on which wage computations are based — time cards, work and time schedules, wage rate tables, and records of additions to or deductions from wages.

Practical advice: keep everything for at least three years, and longer where a state requires it. Splitting your retention by category creates a filing problem for no benefit, and several states require longer periods.

Records must be open for inspection by the Department of Labor, and DOL may ask you to make extensions, recomputations or transcriptions.

What the law does not require

Useful to know, because employers frequently believe otherwise.

No particular form. There is no required format and no required system. Handwritten records are acceptable if they are accurate and complete.

No time clock. The FLSA does not require one. Any timekeeping method may be used, provided it is complete and accurate.

No requirement to record hours for exempt employees. You must keep identifying and pay information, but not daily hours. Many employers record exempt hours anyway for project costing or client billing — that is a business decision and does not affect exempt status by itself, provided the salary basis is preserved. See tracking time for exempt staff.

No requirement that the employee sign the record, though attestation is good practice. See timesheet approval.

Why incomplete records are worse than they look

This is the part that turns a filing failure into a financial one.

Under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. (1946), where an employer has failed to keep adequate records, an employee who shows they performed work for which they were not properly compensated may carry their burden by producing sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference. The burden then shifts to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise amount of work performed, or with evidence to negate the reasonableness of the inference.

In practice: if your records are missing or unreliable, the employee's estimate becomes the starting point, and you have to disprove it.

That doctrine is why "we didn't track that" is not a defence. It is closer to the opposite.

Where records typically fall short

Only totals, no daily hours. Weekly totals without daily detail fail the requirement and are difficult to defend.

Rounded records with no underlying data. If your system captures exact punches and stores only rounded totals, you have discarded the evidence that would have shown the rounding was neutral. See rounding time entries.

Edits with no audit trail. Records that can be changed without recording who changed them, when, and why are worth considerably less in a dispute. See correcting time records.

Work outside the system. Email sent at 10pm, calls taken at home, the fifteen minutes before the shift starts. If the work happened and you knew or should have known, the hours are compensable and should be recorded. See off-the-clock work.

Records lost in a system migration. Changing timekeeping vendors without exporting and retaining the historical data is a common and entirely avoidable failure. Retention obligations follow the records, not the software.

Remote work assumed rather than recorded. See timekeeping for remote and hybrid staff.

State requirements go further

Federal recordkeeping is a floor.

Many states require additional items on wage statements — pay rate, hours worked, pay period dates, employer identity — and several require longer retention. Some require records to be produced to the employee on request within a defined period, with penalties for failure.

If you employ in more than one state, build to the strictest applicable requirement rather than maintaining several standards. The administrative saving from doing otherwise is small and the risk of applying the wrong rule in the wrong state is not.

A practical standard

Beyond the legal minimum, records that hold up in a dispute have four properties:

Contemporaneous. Recorded as the work happens, not reconstructed afterwards. Reconstruction is visible and it undermines everything else.

Granular. Daily in and out times, including meal periods where the state requires them. Not weekly totals.

Attributable. Clear who recorded, who edited, and who approved.

Preserved. Including the raw underlying data, not only the processed output, and surviving any system change.

A short audit

Twice a year, take one pay period and check:

• [ ] Every non-exempt employee has daily hours recorded
• [ ] Workweek start day is documented and consistent
• [ ] Pay basis and regular rate are recorded for each employee
• [ ] Meal periods recorded where the state requires it
• [ ] Edits carry a reason, an author and a timestamp
• [ ] Raw punch data retained alongside processed totals
• [ ] Records from your previous system still accessible
• [ ] Retention meets the longest applicable period across your states

Half a day, twice a year. The alternative is discovering the gaps during an investigation, when the three-day production deadline does not leave room to fix anything.