Joint Employer Status Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act

What it does

Since 2021, the Department has not provided any regulatory guidance addressing joint employer status under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA or Act) for the benefit of workers, employers, or its enforcement personnel. In this rulemaking, the Department proposes to clarify how to determine joint employer status under the FLSA in Part 791 of Title 29, where its joint employer regulations were located prior to 2021. Additionally, the Department is also proposing to amend provisions in its regulations implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA) to provide that joint employer status under those laws be determined using the Department's FLSA analysis, as the FMLA and MSPA both incorporate the FLSA's employment definitions. This rulemaking is intended to provide clarity and a measure of uniformity for employers and employees in an area of the law where components of legislative, executive, and judicial branches--at both the federal and state levels--have presented widely varying tests and standards. In addition, the proposed rule offers a nationwide standard for use by the Department's investigators and law enforcement personnel that would not only ensure the evenhanded application of the Act in matters that often cross state and circuit lines but also preserve core consistency with the wide variety of potentially relevant judicial frameworks. The proposed rule intends to marshal the commonality between those approaches closest to the statute as construed by the courts and, in so doing, simplify the Department's enforcement of the law, reduce litigation, and provide a reliable and uniform analysis for workers and employers that ultimately applies and complements the core commonality between the various tests applied by the federal courts.

The Wage and Hour Division's summary, as published in the Federal Register.

What it would change

4 parts of Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations:

29 CFR 500, 29 CFR 780, 29 CFR 791, 29 CFR 825

Before this

No earlier Federal Register document under regulation identifier 1235-AA48 since Jan. 1, 2025.

What happens next and when

Interested persons are invited to submit written comments on this notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). Comments must be received on or before June 22, 2026.

The agency's dates, word for word.

Check it yourself

• The document in the Federal Register
• Docket WHD-2026-0067 on Regulations.gov
• Title 29 on eCFR

The record as published

Source: the Federal Register (public domain). The document in the Federal Register