On-Call Duty: Unpaid Overtime Disguised as 'Ownership', Debate Grows in 2026

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A growing debate in mid-2026 questions whether on-call work constitutes unpaid overtime or is adequately covered by higher base salaries in the tech industry. Under the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, salaried software engineers earning above $35,568 annually are exempt from overtime protections, and the Department of Labor classifies remote on-call availability as 'waiting to be engaged,' meaning it typically goes uncompensated. Industry data from Incident.io and Rootly shows flat on-call payments of $200–$1,200 per month are common in the U.S., while European labor laws compel companies to pay around €1,000 per week for the same availability. Critics argue that framing constant availability as 'ownership' obscures its true nature as additional labor, with burnout a documented risk when engineers handle more than two to three actionable incidents per shift. Nobl9 COO Kit Merker noted that engineers are increasingly leaving jobs not over management but over unsustainable on-call rotations.

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