Three dollars an hour to not drink.
That's the going rate for owning your entire evening. You can't have a beer. You can't drive two towns over. You can't take a nap so deep you'd miss the phone.
The thing nobody wants to price
Being on call is not work, but it's not vacation either. It's the perfect balance.
You are not under the influence of alcohol. You are close to your house. You can get to your worksite within thirty minutes.
I often come across the same argument sparking up on the internet. A person shares their $3-4/hr standby rate and questions if it's acceptable.
Some say taking a small stipend and 1.5x-3x when you are actually paged is fair. Others say you've essentially been convinced to rent your freedom for the cost of a cup of coffee. ☕
The law already decided you lose
Here's what is painful. A decision was made by the legal system on this issue many decades ago, and it was not in your favor.
According to 29 CFR §785.17 you can break on-call time into two categories. "Engaged to wait" means it's paid time. "Waiting to be engaged" doesn't have to be paid, unless you end up working.
The 1944 Supreme Court case Skidmore v. Swift & Co. established the test for how much control your employer has over your time to determine which bucket you land in.
That may seem reasonable. However, in reality, it is not.
For example, in a 1999 Seventh Circuit case, rural Wisconsin EMTs weren't entitled to be paid their entire regular salary for being on call when they had to stay completely sober and report to the hospital within seven minutes.
Please read that one more time. A combination of complete sobriety and being on a leash for seven minutes was considered not to be a severe enough limitation to be qualified as work.
The receipts
This isn't theoretical. The dollar figures are almost comically consistent across totally different jobs.
→ In January 2024, IBEW Local 1245 bumped standby pay from $2.28 to $3.00 an hour. That was the win.
→ During a November 2023 Stockton utility strike, Rex Benedict, a collections systems operator of 17 years, said workers were forced onto off-hour standby for $3 extra an hour.
→ In Hooksett, New Hampshire, a 2026-2029 DPW contract raised standby from $10 a day to $15 a day. For a 16-hour off-shift, that's under a dollar an hour.
→ In an August 2026 forum, a registered nurse described her on-call arrangement, noting she is paid $3/hour for standby time and 1.5x her normal pay if called in. Same story across multiple hospitals, multiple states.
→ A Michigan worker reported $3.40 an hour with a strict 30-minute response window.
Nurses, linemen, EMTs, public works crews - disparate professions, but they all have one thing in common.
Three bucks an hour is what a restricted evening costs when the buyer sets the price.
What we're actually arguing about
The idea of receiving a stipend plus 1.5 times that amount if you're paged may seem fair, but it undervalues one thing - your time on call waiting to be paged.
What they are paying for is that reassurance of having a human on call at 2 am who will be sober and ready to respond. This assurance is extremely valuable to them, but is not reflected much in your paycheck.
In the tech world, we essentially do the same thing, but we have more comfortable chairs. On-call rotations, getting alerts from PagerDuty, and being told to "just make sure you have your laptop nearby this weekend" is the same leash in a fancier case.
The counterargument carries weight: if you're not actually doing anything that causes things to break, why should you be paid the full amount? Fair enough. But then acknowledge that the employer is in fact asking the worker to work unpaid and patting itself on the back for its generosity when it throws the worker three bucks.
Time that is limited but unoccupied is work. You surrendered your night. Someone else invested it. The only question is whether you were compensated with a salary or a souvenir.
What is the lowest standby rate that you have uncomplainingly agreed to, and will you do it once more? 👀
