Hybrid work schedule: types, examples and a sample policy

A hybrid work schedule is a set pattern of office days and remote days, such as in the office Tuesday through Thursday and at home Monday and Friday. The pattern matters less than the rules around it: who decides the office days, how hourly staff record time at home, which state's tax you withhold, and what happens when someone books PTO on an anchor day. This guide compares the five common hybrid models, shows sample weeks for real kinds of teams, gives you a hybrid work policy to copy, and covers the federal and state rules that apply once people work from home. It is general information, not legal or tax advice.

What is a hybrid work schedule?

A hybrid schedule sits between fully on-site and fully remote work. Employees spend some regular days at a company location and the rest at home or another approved place. Most small businesses that run one have a mix: front-line staff who can only work on site, and office roles (bookkeeping, scheduling, marketing, customer support, management) that can do part of the week from home.

Two terms come up a lot:

• Office days (or anchor days) are the days an employee is expected at the workplace. They can be fixed for everyone, set per team, or chosen by the employee within a minimum.
• Core hours are the hours everyone is reachable, wherever they work, for example 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Core hours are separate from office days; you can have one without the other.

A hybrid schedule is about where people work. It can be combined with a compressed week that changes when they work, like the 9/80 work schedule, which gives every other Friday off.

5 types of hybrid work schedule compared

Each model trades predictability against flexibility. The table compares them on the questions small employers ask most.

Some roles are not hybrid at all. A barista, cashier, nurse or warehouse picker works where the work is. If your business has both kinds of jobs, say plainly in the policy which positions are eligible and why, and apply the rule the same way to everyone in a position.

How to choose a hybrid model

Pick the model that matches how the work actually happens, not what other companies announce. Work through these questions in order:

1. What must happen in person? List the tasks that need the office: handling cash or mail, training new hires, using on-site equipment, client visits, a weekly planning meeting. If they cluster on certain days, those are your anchor days.
2. Who needs to overlap? If a team works as a unit, give it shared days (cohort model). If people mostly work alone, a flexible minimum is enough.
3. How much space do you have? If you have fewer desks than people, a fixed model for everyone will not fit. Cohort days or week on/week off spread the load.
4. Where do people live? If anyone works from a different state, even part of the week, read the tax section before you approve it.
5. Who is hourly? Non-exempt employees need a reliable way to record time at home. Check each role with our guide to exempt vs non-exempt employees, because a hybrid job title does not change overtime eligibility.
6. How will people see the plan? A hybrid schedule nobody can look up becomes a group text. Put office days on the same schedule as shifts and time off.

Start with a trial period, such as one quarter, and say in writing that the schedule may change with business needs. That keeps the door open to adjust without it feeling like a broken promise.

Hybrid schedule examples

These sample weeks are illustrative. Swap in your own days and hours. If you want a blank grid to fill in, start from our work schedule template.

Example 1: fixed office days for a small support office

Northfield Coffee in Austin, Texas runs its cafés on site, but its small support office handles bookkeeping, ordering and marketing. The office team (Hana Patel, operations manager; Ben Okafor, bookkeeper; Lena Fischer, marketing coordinator) uses fixed office days because deliveries arrive Tuesday and Thursday and the weekly planning meeting is Wednesday.

Ben is non-exempt and paid hourly, so he clocks in and out on home days just as he does in the office. With a 30-minute unpaid lunch, each day is 8 hours of work and the week is 40, so any extra hour he works on a home day is overtime.

Example 2: cohort days for two teams

Neither team is in the office on the same day except the monthly meeting, so the business needs only enough desks for its larger team.

Example 3: flexible with a two-day minimum

Each employee picks at least two office days a week and posts them on the schedule by Thursday for the next week. A manager can ask for a specific day with 48 hours' notice, for example for training. This works best when the schedule shows everyone's chosen days in one place, so people can plan to overlap.

Example 4: week on, week off

Group A is in the office one week while Group B works from home, and the groups swap every Monday. Because the cycle is two weeks long, it lines up with a biweekly pay period: each paycheck covers exactly one office week and one home week for every employee, which makes timesheets easy to check. Avoid tying the rotation to calendar months, since months with a fifth week throw the pattern off.

Hybrid work policy template

A written hybrid work policy keeps the rules the same for everyone and gives you something to point to when a question comes up. Copy the template, replace every [bracketed] item, and add it to your handbook. Our employee handbook template shows where it fits with your attendance, PTO and timekeeping sections.

Have an employment attorney review the policy for each state where you have hybrid employees, especially sections 4, 6 and 7, which change the most from state to state.

Tracking hours for hourly staff working from home

Working from home does not change the Fair Labor Standards Act. Non-exempt employees must be paid at least minimum wage for every hour worked and 1.5 times their regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek, and some states, such as California, add daily overtime. The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division spelled out how this applies to telework in Field Assistance Bulletin 2023-1, issued February 9, 2023:

• Short breaks are paid. Breaks of 20 minutes or less count as hours worked, whether the employee is at home, at the office or somewhere else.
• Longer breaks are unpaid only if the employee is fully off duty. A bona fide meal period, usually 30 minutes or more, is not work time if the employee is completely relieved from duty. A lunch spent answering work calls is work time.
• Off-the-clock work counts if you know or should know about it. If the employer knows or has reason to believe work is being done, the time is hours worked, at home or in the office. The bulletin says an employer can meet its duty by having a reasonable way for employees to report unscheduled time and then paying for all reported hours, even hours it did not ask for. It points to Field Assistance Bulletin 2020-5 for more on tracking teleworkers' hours.
• Pumping breaks apply at home too. The FLSA's break time and private space rules for nursing employees apply when teleworking, and the bulletin says the employee must be free from observation by any employer video system, including a computer camera or web meeting.

In practice, that means a hybrid hourly employee should clock in and out on home days with the same app they use at the office, and your policy should say that messages answered after hours are recorded and paid. For more on systems that do this, see our guide to time and attendance tracking.

Commuting from home to the office on an office day is normally not work time. Travel in the middle of a workday can be, for example if an employee works at home in the morning and then drives to the office or a client. That situation turns on the facts, so check it with an employment attorney if it happens often.

Exempt employees do not clock in for pay purposes, but the salary basis test still applies at home: an exempt employee who does any work in a week generally gets the full salary for that week, except for the deductions federal and state law allow.

State income tax withholding for remote days

This is the part of a hybrid work policy that surprises small employers most, and the rules are different in every state. In general, states tax wages based on where the employee physically does the work. If your office is in one state and a hybrid employee works from home in another, you may need to register with the second state, withhold its income tax for the remote days, and possibly pay its unemployment insurance. Some neighboring states have reciprocity agreements that simplify this, so check both states' revenue departments.

A few states go further with a "convenience of the employer" rule. The best known is New York. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance says that for a nonresident whose primary office is in New York, days telecommuting from outside the state are treated as days worked in New York, unless the employer has established a bona fide employer office at the telecommuting location. Its guidance on what counts as a bona fide employer office is in technical memorandum TSB-M-06(5)I. In plain terms, a New Jersey or Connecticut resident who works from home two days a week for convenience, for an employer based in New York, may still owe New York tax on those home days.

Tax advisers commonly list Delaware, Nebraska and Pennsylvania as having their own versions, and Connecticut and New Jersey apply a version only to residents of states that have such a rule. The details differ and have changed in recent years. Before approving an out-of-state remote arrangement, confirm the withholding rules with each state's revenue department or a payroll tax adviser.

Local taxes can apply too. Some cities and counties levy a payroll or income tax based on where work is performed, so a move across a city line can matter as much as a move across a state line.

Expenses, equipment and workers' comp at home

Expense reimbursement

Federal law does not require employers to reimburse home office costs in general. Under the FLSA's "free and clear" rule (29 CFR 531.35), the problem arises only if an employee's unreimbursed costs for tools the job requires cut into the minimum wage or overtime owed for the week. That is most likely for lower-paid hourly staff.

Some states require more:

• California. Labor Code section 2802 requires employers to indemnify employees for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred in direct consequence of their job duties. California courts have applied it to the work use of personal cell phones, holding that the employer owes a reasonable percentage of the bill even on an unlimited plan. Many employers apply the same reasoning to home internet for remote work.
• Illinois. Section 9.5 of the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act requires reimbursement of necessary expenditures that are required for the job and primarily benefit the employer, when the employer authorized or required them. Employers may set written guidelines and limits, but a policy cannot provide for no or only trivial reimbursement. Employees generally submit expenses within 30 days.
• Other states and cities. A handful of others have their own reimbursement laws. Check your state labor department.

A flat monthly stipend for internet and phone is common because it is simple to run. Make sure it covers the realistic cost in states that require reimbursement, and talk to your payroll provider about whether it is taxable wages; a stipend paid without receipts is generally treated differently from reimbursement under an accountable plan.

Equipment and security

Decide what the company provides (laptop, monitor, headset, phone) and what the employee supplies, and keep an inventory with serial numbers so equipment comes back at the end of employment. Require company-managed devices for payroll, customer and employee records, multi-factor sign-in, automatic screen lock and updates. Before deducting the cost of unreturned equipment from a final paycheck, check your state's wage deduction rules; many states restrict or ban it, and under federal law a deduction cannot take pay below minimum wage.

Workers' compensation

Workers' comp generally covers injuries that arise out of and in the course of employment, and a home office is not automatically outside that. A hybrid employee who trips over a laptop cord during a work call may have a claim; one who is hurt doing household chores on a break may not. Results depend on the state and the facts. Two steps help: require prompt reporting of remote injuries in your policy, and tell your insurance carrier which states your remote employees work from, since coverage is tied to where employees work.

PTO and leave on hybrid teams

Hybrid schedules make time off harder to see. When half the team is home on any given day, an empty chair does not tell you whether someone is remote, sick or on vacation. A few rules keep it straight:

• Remote days are not PTO and PTO is not a remote day. Say so in the policy. An employee who is too sick to work takes sick leave, and one who is working from home is working.
• Show office days and PTO together. A PTO calendar that sits next to the hybrid schedule lets managers spot when too many people are off on an anchor day. Our paid time off guide covers accrual, carryover and state sick leave laws.
• Holidays. Decide whether an office day that falls on a paid holiday is moved or simply skipped, and write it down.
• FMLA eligibility. Field Assistance Bulletin 2023-1 says teleworkers are eligible for FMLA leave on the same basis as other employees. Hours worked at home count toward the 1,250-hour requirement, and a teleworker's worksite for the 50-employees-within-75-miles test is the office they report to or receive assignments from, not their home. See our FMLA leave guide for the full eligibility rules.

If you track absences with points or warnings, make sure your attendance policy explains what counts as late or absent on a remote day, such as not being signed in by the start of core hours.

What employers should do

1. Decide which positions are eligible and write down why, based on the work.
2. Pick one hybrid model from the table above and set office days, core hours and a trial period.
3. Publish the schedule where everyone can see it, with office days, shifts and approved time off together.
4. Set up timekeeping at home for non-exempt employees, with a way to report and pay after-hours work.
5. Record each employee's work address and require approval before anyone works from another state.
6. Check withholding and registration with each state where a hybrid employee works, including convenience of the employer rules.
7. Set an expense rule (stipend or reimbursement) that meets your state's law, and an equipment and security standard.
8. Tell your workers' comp carrier where remote employees work.
9. Have employees sign the hybrid work policy and review it each year.

Frequently asked questions