On September 7, 2026, the United States Department of Labor (DOL) issued an opinion analyzing what many people would describe as their dream job: volunteering to care for puppies learning to become service dogs. A nonprofit organization that trains service dogs asked the DOL to opine on whether its employees could also serve as volunteers. The nonprofit corporation included veterinarians, service dog instructors, and directors of the instructors on its staff. These employees are considered exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and had expressed interest in serving as “juvenile canine caretakers” by training and socializing puppies at their homes outside of their working hours. They had offered to do so on a volunteer basis.
The nonprofit corporation asked the DOL to determine whether these employees could actually serve as volunteer caretakers without being compensated under the FLSA. In general, the FLSA requires employers to pay non-exempt employees at least the federal minimum wage for hours worked and overtime for hours worked in excess of forty hours per week. The FLSA expects exempt employees to be compensated on a salary basis that is not dependent on the hours or days worked per pay period. But the FLSA does not have the same standards for volunteers. “Volunteers” are individuals who agree to provide services without compensation. Importantly, the services at issue cannot be the same services that the individual provides as an employee of the organization.
Hence, the question here was whether the veterinarians, instructors, and/or directors performed services that were sufficiently dissimilar from their employed services when they acted as puppy-in-training caretakers. The DOL analyzed each of these employees in turn under this standard. The DOL assumed that the veterinarians provided medical care, such as diagnosing and treating sick or injured dogs. The directors’ duties involved supervising instructors but not directly interacting with puppies. The DOL considered these roles distinct enough from caretaker duties that the directors were acting as volunteers in this additional role.
However, the same was not true for the instructors. The at-home socialization and caretaking services included training. The instructors were already providing training as part of their employment relationship with the nonprofit corporation. As a result, there was not enough of a distinction between the instructors’ normal job duties and the puppy caretaking services to make the latter a volunteer activity. If the instructors chose to act as caretakers, it would be part of the instructors’ overall employment relationship and must be counted as hours worked under the FLSA.
The DOL then turned to these employees’ exempt statuses. The DOL adopted the nonprofit corporation’s position that each of the veterinarians, directors, and instructors were exempt employees under the FLSA. The veterinarians and directors could freely provide puppy caretaking services as volunteers without any threat to their exempt statuses. However, the analysis was different for the instructors since they would not be acting as volunteers. The DOL explained that an employee can perform both exempt and non-exempt work. But to maintain their exempt status, their primary duty must be dedicated to exempt work. Determining an employee’s primary duty requires considering all the facts, with the main focus on the employee’s job as a whole.
For the instructors, the DOL assumed that puppy socialization was non-exempt work. Hence, the instructors were performing exempt work through their normal training services as well as the non-exempt caretaking duties. Because they were not volunteers, their time as puppy caretakers is relevant and could impact the ultimate conclusion on whether or not they were exempt employees under the FLSA.
Nonprofit corporations can—and often do—rely on volunteer work. The FLSA was drafted to allow for this. But nonprofit corporations should closely review situations where their own employees provide volunteer services. What could be a voluntary role that falls outside of the FLSA for one employee may not be true for another employee. A failure to appreciate that distinction (and to compensate employees by providing services in line with their employment relationship) could result in consequences for the nonprofit. Further, employees’ exempt status could be threatened if they incorrectly believe that they are volunteers providing non-exempt services.
