Dual Jobs 80/20 Sidework Calculator

What happened to the 80/20 rule

In October 2021 the Department of Labor issued the Dual Jobs final rule (86 FR 60114). It said that a tipped worker's directly supporting work could not exceed 20 percent of the tip-credited hours in a workweek, and that no single continuous stretch of it could run past 30 minutes, without the employer losing the tip credit on the overage.

That rule is gone. On August 23, 2024 the Fifth Circuit held in Restaurant Law Center v. U.S. Department of Labor (No. 23-50562) that the rule was inconsistent with the FLSA because it "imposes a line-drawing regime that Congress did not countenance." The order vacating the regulatory text issued on October 29, 2024. Then, on December 17, 2024, the DOL published Tip Regulations Under the FLSA; Restoration of Regulatory Language (89 FR 107887), which removed 29 CFR 531.56(f) from the Code of Federal Regulations entirely and restored the pre-2021 text.

Read the current regulation and it ends at paragraph (e). There is no paragraph (f), no 20 percent tolerance, and no 30-minute clock anywhere in it. This matters because a lot of older writing still says the rule "was struck down in the Fifth Circuit but applies elsewhere." That was true for about four months in late 2024. It is not true now: the December 2024 final rule deleted the text nationwide, so there is no circuit split and no geography to describe. No replacement rulemaking has issued since.

What survives federally is the original dual jobs test at 29 CFR 531.56(e). If you hold two genuinely distinct occupations for one employer (the regulation's own example is a hotel maintenance person who also works shifts as a waiter), the employer cannot take a tip credit for the hours in the non-tipped occupation. That is an occupational test, not a percentage or a stopwatch.

So why compute the benchmark at all? Two reasons. It is still the measure most people understand, which gives you shared language when you raise the issue with a manager. And it is the template four states copied into their own law, where it is enforceable.

How the two tests actually worked

The mechanics get misstated constantly, so here they are straight from the regulation's own text.

The 30-minute test (former 531.56(f)(4)(ii)) applied to any continuous period of directly supporting work longer than 30 minutes. The employer could not take a tip credit "for any time that exceeds 30 minutes." Only the minutes past 30, not the entire block. Those excess minutes were then "excluded in calculating the 20 percent tolerance," which is the regulation's own anti-double-count mechanism.

The 20 percent test (former 531.56(f)(4)(i)) took 20 percent of the hours in the workweek for which the employer had taken a tip credit, and the employer could not take a tip credit "for any time spent on directly supporting work that exceeds the 20 percent tolerance." Again, only the excess.

Because the 30-minute excess comes out of both the numerator and the denominator before the 20 percent test runs, an hour can be caught by one test or the other, never both. That is why this calculator combines them in sequence rather than taking whichever is larger. Taking the larger throws away whatever the other test found; adding the raw results counts the same hour twice.

A worked example. Say you put in 30 hours this week, 7 of them on sidework, with one 75-minute closing block:

• 30-minute excess: (75 - 30) ÷ 60 = 0.75 hrs
• Tip-credited hours: 30 - 0.75 = 29.25 hrs
• 20% tolerance: 0.20 × 29.25 = 5.85 hrs
• Adjusted sidework: 7 - 0.75 = 6.25 hrs
• Hours over the tolerance: 6.25 - 5.85 = 0.40 hrs
• Reclassified: 0.75 + 0.40 = 1.15 hrs

At the federal floors, the gap between $7.25 and $2.13 is $5.12 per hour, so 1.15 hours works out to $5.89 for the week. Small on its own, and about $306 across a year of weeks like that. Your state's gap is probably wider than $5.12, which is why the wage fields are editable.

The four states with their own rule

Here is the part no aggregator gets right: the four states with live sidework rules disagree with each other about what reclassifies. Same week, four different answers.

• Pennsylvania (34 Pa. Code section 231.111): pays only the excess. Hours past the 20 percent threshold get the full minimum wage.
• New Jersey (N.J.A.C. 12:56-3.5): a cliff edge. Once related duties pass 20 percent of the workweek, every related-duty hour loses the tip credit. New Jersey's own guidance works an example where a worker spends 10 of 40 hours on related duties and loses the tip credit on all 10, not on the 2 hours of excess.
• New York (12 NYCRR 146-2.9): measured per day, and it voids the whole day. Non-tipped work of 2 hours or more, or more than 20 percent of the shift, whichever is less, means no tip credit for any hour worked that day. The regulation's own example: an 8-hour shift with 1 hour 45 minutes of food prep passes the 1 hour 36 minute threshold, so the entire day is at full minimum wage.
• Massachusetts (M.G.L. c. 151 section 7; 454 CMR 27.03): no percentage threshold at all. Any separate period of non-tipped work has to be paid at least the full minimum wage, which is stricter than 80/20 ever was.

Pennsylvania deserves a closer look, because its rule survived the federal vacatur and almost nobody explains why. Section 231.111 incorporates the federal standards at 29 CFR 531.56 "in effect as of May 7, 2022," with an express exception for subsection (f)(4)(ii). Two things follow. The incorporation is frozen to a dated version of the federal text, so when the Fifth Circuit vacated the federal rule in 2024 it did not reach into the Pennsylvania Code, and the 20 percent test still stands there. And because Pennsylvania carved out (f)(4)(ii), the 30-minute test never applied in Pennsylvania at all. A 90-minute closing block is not by itself a Pennsylvania problem.

In Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington the question does not arise: those states allow no tip credit, so every hour is paid at full minimum wage and your tips sit on top of it.

Track your sidework so the number means something

With the federal rule gone, your own records matter more than they did before. Where a state rule applies, the fight is almost always about how many hours were actually spent on what, and the employer's timekeeping usually records only clock-in and clock-out.

Log it per shift: when you clocked in and out, the specific tasks, and how long each unbroken stretch of sidework ran. A note written the night of the shift beats a reconstruction six months later. Under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., if the employer's records are inadequate, an employee's reasonable estimate can shift the burden onto the employer to disprove it. Your notes are what make that estimate reasonable.

Server44 records hours, tips, and tip-outs per shift and exports the history, so if you ever need to show a state investigator or a lawyer what your weeks looked like, you have something dated rather than a memory. You can get the app here. Once you know which hours should have been at the full rate, the tip credit calculator shows what the employer was allowed to claim, and the tipped employee overtime calculator handles the weeks that cross 40 hours.