On-Call Time and the Law: When Standby Becomes Work

The phone lights up on the nightstand before the ringtone even registers. Three in the morning, and somewhere across town an alarm has tripped, a boiler has failed, a lift is stuck between floors. You are awake before you decide to be, pulling on yesterday’s jeans, keys already in hand. The drive to the site is quiet at that hour, streetlights strobing past an empty windscreen, and by the time you park up outside the building the only thing on your mind is the fault, not the clock. Somebody, eventually, has to think about the clock.

That is the trouble with being on call. The waiting is a fog: was it forty minutes of pacing the kitchen or an hour and a half half-watching a film you cannot name the next morning. The callout itself is sharper, but by the time the invoice or the payslip gets written up, even that has softened into a rough guess. Whether any of it counts as working time, and how much of it gets paid, has been argued in courtrooms for years, and the argument keeps landing in the same place: it depends on how free you actually were, and on what you can actually prove.

The clearest word on this came from the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case of a Belgian volunteer firefighter named Rudy Matzak. Mr Matzak had to remain contactable during his standby periods and, crucially, had to be able to reach the fire station within eight minutes of a call. The Court ruled in 2018 that this standby time counted in full as working time, not because he was doing anything active while he waited, but because the eight-minute leash meant he could not realistically live his evening: no dinner out, no proper sleep, nothing that took him more than a short dash from his door. The test the Court set is one of substance over appearance. It asks how severely the constraints placed on a worker limit what they can do with the time that is nominally their own.

What UK law actually says

The Working Time Regulations 1998, which carried the EU Working Time Directive into UK law and still apply after Brexit, never bothered to define “on-call”, “standby” or “callout”. ACAS puts the practical test plainly: time on call counts as working time when you are required to do work your employer sets out, but usually does not count if you are away from the workplace and free to spend that time as you wish. Tribunals have picked up where Matzak left off. In Thomas and others v the Chief Constable of Humberside Police, an employment tribunal found that officers in a covert unit were, in effect, never off duty during their on-call rota: the restrictions on where they could be and how quickly they had to respond were tight enough that the whole period, not just the response itself, counted as working time. The pattern across these cases is consistent. Judges look past the label on the rota and ask how much of a normal evening the arrangement actually left intact.

Waiting is argued. The callout never is.

Here is where the distinction actually bites in practice. Whether the waiting itself counts as working time is a genuine argument, one that turns on curfews, response windows and how far you can stray from home. Nobody sensible argues about the callout. The moment the phone is answered and the job starts, whether that is a fault diagnosed over the line, a drive to a site, or hours spent fixing whatever went wrong, that is unquestionably work. It has to be paid, and it has to be counted towards weekly hours and any overtime or standby allowance the contract promises. There is no version of employment law, EU or domestic, in which answering an emergency call at 3am and driving forty minutes to deal with it is somehow not work.

And yet this is exactly where things fall apart, not because the principle is unclear but because the record of it is. A callout logged from memory a fortnight later, scribbled onto a timesheet at the end of the month, is a guess dressed up as a fact. Did the job start when the phone rang or when the van pulled up. Did it last fifty minutes or closer to ninety. Multiply that fog across a rota of five or six people covering nights and weekends, and you get exactly the kind of dispute that lands on an HR desk: an allowance calculated wrong, overtime nobody can agree on, a worker convinced they are owed hours the business insists were never worked. Both sides are usually telling the truth as they remember it, which is precisely the problem.

Why proof settles it before the argument starts

A time that is proven rather than remembered changes the shape of that conversation entirely. For the person driving out at 3am, it means every genuine callout is captured and paid, without having to fight to have their word taken over a manager’s estimate. For the business, it means allowances and overtime get calculated against something firmer than a shared guess, and if a dispute ever does reach a tribunal, there is a real record to hand over rather than a reconstructed one. Neither side needs the argument to be settled by whoever happens to remember more convincingly.

In principle, the fix is almost embarrassingly simple: a clock that starts the instant a callout begins and stops the instant it ends, tagged with the time and the place, for every person and every night, exportable the moment anyone needs it. That is the gap GeoTapp closes, not by deciding what counts as standby, which remains a legal question for the contract and the courts, but by giving the intervention itself a timestamp and a location nobody has to reconstruct from memory.

So the next time that phone lights up at an unreasonable hour, ask yourself honestly: if someone questioned how long that callout actually took, would you have an answer, or just a memory of being tired. If it is the second one, it might be worth changing that before the next 3am call, not after.