A former nurse has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, accusing the pediatric health system of running a time-rounding policy that shaved hours off employee paychecks and left nurses without overtime pay they were owed. The suit seeks to represent current and former nurses.
According to The Business Journals, the former nurse filed the case last week against Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. The filing alleges the system maintained a policy of rounding down employee hours, a practice the former nurse says resulted in unpaid overtime, per the same report.
The lawsuit is not the only legal action Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has faced over its pay practices. In June 2025, a woman named Brittani Hawk filed a complaint with a jury demand against the health system, according to court records reviewed on CourtListener. That case, Hawk v. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Inc., is docketed as 1:25-cv-03391 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The evidence available does not establish any relationship between that earlier case and the new proposed class action.
Another Federal Case
Another federal case involving the health system is Nichols v. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Inc.
Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has not responded publicly to the new allegations, and no comment from the health system or its attorneys was available at the time of this report.
What Federal Rounding Rules Actually Allow
Time rounding itself is not automatically illegal. Federal regulations acknowledge that many industries, particularly those using time clocks, have long rounded employees' starting and stopping times to the nearest five minutes, tenth of an hour, or quarter hour, according to the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. The practice is permissible, under that framework, as long as it does not systematically shortchange workers over time.
The U.S. Department of Labor's healthcare-specific guidance spells out how that rounding is supposed to work in practice. Per the U.S. Department of Labor, employee time from one to seven minutes may be rounded down and not counted as hours worked, but time from eight to 14 minutes must be rounded up and counted as a full quarter hour. Separately, the department's overtime fact sheet notes that covered, nonexempt employees must receive time-and-a-half pay for any hours worked beyond 40 in a given workweek.
Part of a Wider Pattern in Health Care
The Children's Healthcare of Atlanta suit follows similar wage disputes cropping up at hospital systems elsewhere in the country. A nurse at an Oklahoma health system has claimed a compensation-rounding policy underpaid him by failing to credit time worked when employees clocked in early for a shift, according to Law360 Employment Authority.
A patient-registration worker separately sued the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, alleging the hospital system's timekeeping software rounded time in the company's favor, Law360 also reported. And in Virginia, a former Chesapeake Regional nurse filed a federal lawsuit alleging the hospital's meal-break, timekeeping and overtime practices resulted in unpaid wages for hourly employees, according to WTKR.
It remains unclear whether the proposed class in the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta case has been certified, and the available court records do not detail the specific rounding increments, time periods or damages the former nurse is seeking. The case adds to a growing list of wage-and-hour disputes testing how hospital systems track the minutes that add up to overtime pay.
