On-Call Pay for Managers: What to Ask For

If your company expects you to be reachable out of hours, it should say so in writing and pay for it. Proper on-call pay is rare, and unpaid, unwritten on-call is the most common way a company takes advantage of a manager, and it’s the part of the job that nobody puts in the offer letter.

In August 2008 I wrote that managers rarely get compensated for being on call, and that companies need to understand what that costs. The curse of the berry piece was about the problem. This one is about what you can actually ask for.

Is on-call time actually working time?

It depends on where you live and on how restricted you are while you wait. That’s the honest answer, and anyone who tells you it’s simple is selling something.

The clearest public example comes from Europe. In its judgment of 9 September 2003 in the Jaeger case, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that hospital doctors required to be physically present at the workplace on call were working for the whole of that time, even when they were asleep in a rest room. The Court’s reasoning was that they had to be at the place the employer chose and available to provide their services immediately if needed. It followed an earlier ruling, SIMAP, in 2000, that reached the same conclusion for doctors in Spain.

Two things about that ruling are worth being straight about.

• It concerns presence at the workplace. A support manager with a phone at home, free to go to the supermarket or the park, is in a different position. The Court distinguished between being required to be physically at a location and simply being contactable.
• It’s about hospital doctors under one EU directive. It doesn’t give a support manager in Canada or the U.S. a legal claim. Local rules, contracts and exemptions for managers vary, and I’m not a lawyer.

So I’m not suggesting that you cite a European court to your finance director. The reason it matters is the principle underneath it: being held available is a cost to the person, even when they aren’t actively working. The law has recognised that for a long time, in the places where it has been tested. The only question for you is whether your company has recognised it too.

What does it cost a company to pay for on-call properly?

Less than most companies assume, which is why it’s worth asking. Here’s the arithmetic that I’d put in front of a finance director.

Covering one seat around the clock takes 168 hours a week, and one full-time person works about 40 of them. So the out-of-hours portion of a week is 128 hours. If your real exposure is a rota of one person at a time, you’re not paying for 128 hours of work. You’re paying for 128 hours of availability, and the actual calls might add up to a handful of hours.

That’s why a flat on-call allowance is the usual answer. Whatever the number, the structure is simple: a fixed amount for each week a person carries the phone, and extra time or pay when they’re actually called out. The fixed part recognises the restriction on the person’s evening. The variable part recognises the work.

The alternative is the manager absorbing it for nothing, which has a cost too. It just isn’t on a budget line. It shows up as burnout, resignations, and a manager who stops being able to think about anything beyond the next call.

What should you ask for?

Ask for something specific and ask in writing. Vague requests get vague answers. A one-page proposal is enough, and these are the pieces I’d include:

• A named rota. Who carries the phone, which week, and who covers if they can’t. A rota spreads the load, and it makes it obvious how many people the company is actually relying on.
• A compensation rule. An allowance, time off in lieu, or both. If the company won’t pay, ask for the time. A manager who answers three late calls on Tuesday should be able to start late on Wednesday without asking permission.
• A definition of what counts. Which events justify a call: a full outage, a named customer, a security issue. Everything else waits until morning. Without it, “on call” means “reachable for anything.”
• A response expectation. Fifteen minutes to acknowledge is a different commitment from “within the hour.” Say which one it is.
• A review date. Revisit it after a quarter, using the log of calls you’ve kept.

The log is the thing that makes the proposal credible. Four weeks of dates, times and durations turn “I’m tired” into a document a finance person can evaluate.

If you haven’t yet written down who gets called and in what order, start with the escalation matrix. It’s hard to argue for compensation for a plan that doesn’t exist yet.

What if the answer is no?

Then you’ve learned something important, and it’s better to learn it from a written reply than from a feeling. There are a few things you can do with a no.

First, narrow the commitment. If the company won’t pay for on-call, it can’t reasonably expect a response within 15 minutes at 10pm. Offer a plan that works without one: a documented self-service route for customers, a recorded message that says when you’ll reply, and a trigger list for the few events that truly can’t wait.

Second, make it visible further up. A manager who quietly absorbs an unpaid duty has made the cost invisible. A manager who documents it and puts it to their own boss in writing has made it a decision someone owns.

Third, decide how long you’re willing to carry it. That’s a personal call, not a management technique. The honest version of a no is that the company has decided your evenings are free. It’s fair to treat that as information about the job.

How do you keep the allowance from becoming a source of resentment?

By designing it for the whole team, not just yourself. If the manager gets an on-call allowance and the senior agent who answers the same phone on weekends gets nothing, you’ve created a different problem. The rota should include every role that is genuinely held available, and the compensation rule should apply to all of them in proportion.

Keep the rules visible. Post the rota, the compensation rule and the definition of a call-worthy event somewhere the whole team can read them. When people can see that the load is shared and the cost is acknowledged, they’re much more willing to carry it. When it’s informal, every extra call feels like a favour that someone owes.

It also helps to track what the allowance buys. If the first responder is called twice a month, a large standing payment may be more than you need, and a smaller allowance with call-out pay might fit better. If they’re called twice a night, no allowance fixes the problem, because the problem is the staffing. The log shows you which one you’re in.

Where do exempt managers fit?

This is the awkward case. In many companies a salaried manager is classed as exempt from overtime rules, which is why the company’s reflex is that out-of-hours work is simply part of the salary. Whether that’s legally right depends on where you work, and I’d check with HR or an employment lawyer rather than guess.

Legal or not, it’s a business decision with consequences. A company that pays the agent for the call and not the manager who takes the escalation is telling the manager what their time is worth. Most managers hear it.

One more point on the proposal itself: send it before you need it. A request made in the middle of a bad week sounds like a complaint. The same request made in a calm month, with a log behind it, sounds like management.

The principle underneath

On-call isn’t a measure of commitment. It’s a service the company is buying, and every service has a price and a scope. A manager who treats it as a favour trains the company to treat it as free, and the next manager inherits the same expectation.

Being valuable doesn’t mean being reachable. Make the cost of reaching you something the company has to decide on, rather than something you absorb by default.

Whatever the company decides, write the answer down and put a date on it. A decision nobody can find in six months is a decision that has to be argued again.