Firefighter Overtime Discussing Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for Firefighters, First Responders as well as Human Resource & Finance Professional

The City of Gulf Shores has reached a court approved settlement with two former police officers following their November 2025 lawsuit that contained allegations the city failed to properly compensate the officers for off-the-clock work related to the care and maintenance of their assigned K9s. Former officers Shawn Andrews and Stacy McElroy filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court ...

Three fire captains employed by the City of Bondurant, Iowa have filed a lawsuit alleging the city failed to properly pay overtime required under both Iowa law and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The case was originally filed in Iowa District Court for Polk County earlier this year and later removed by the city to federal court because it ...

A group of more than one hundred current and former employees of the East Hartford Fire Department have filed a federal lawsuit against the Town of East Hartford, Connecticut, alleging violations of the FLSA. The plaintiffs (firefighters) make two basic claims. First, that the Town failed to calculate the firefighters’ regular rate correctly and as a result shorted the firefighters’ ...

State legislators in Vermont and Maryland have proposed new legislation that would mandate firefighter overtime be based on a 42-hour average workweek as opposed to the FLSA’s standard overtime requirements. In recent years, firefighters from across the country have been advocating for a reduction in the number of hours they are traditionally scheduled to work. Key to this effort is ...

The City of West Des Moines, Iowa has agreed to pay nearly $350,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by current and former fire officers who alleged they were denied overtime pay in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). According to The Des Moines Register, the lawsuit was filed by 15 current and former fire officers who claimed ...

According to a complaint filed January 21, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, an EMT employed by the City of Batesville alleges that the city denied him and other similarly situated EMTs overtime and later retaliated against him after he complained. The lawsuit was filed by Jacob Michael King, a former EMT for Batesville ...

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Wage and Hour Division, kicked off the new year with a new opinion letter addressing whether certain employer sponsored incentive bonuses can be excluded from an employee’s “regular rate of pay” when calculating overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The opinion letter responds to a request from an overtime eligible employee that ...

The City of New York has reached a $7.3 million settlement with a class of more than 3,000 current and former EMTs and paramedics following a 2023 FLSA lawsuit. The main allegations advanced by the EMTs and medics revolved around unpaid pre-and-post shift work activities, an automatic deduction of a 30-minute meal period even for work shifts in which work ...

An Illinois paramedic has filed a lawsuit in federal court against his former employer, the City of O’Fallon, claiming the city’s pay practices violate both federal and state wage and hour laws. The crux the lone paramedic’s complaint alleges that the city misclassified him as overtime exempt in violation of the FLSA and the Illinois Minimum Wage law.  Additionally, the ...

On December 31, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that found a group of current and former Alexandria battalion chiefs were ineligible for FLSA overtime. The chiefs had challenged the City of Alexandria’s pay practices as unlawful under both federal and state wage and hour laws. In 2023, a federal district ...