Free HVAC Employee Handbook Template

No federal law requires a handbook at any size. What federal law requires is that certain policies exist and certain notices be given, and those obligations do have headcount triggers — which is why the handbook question is really a question about which policies you owe. At any size you owe FLSA wage and hour compliance, Equal Pay Act compliance, Form I-9 for every hire, USERRA military leave rights, the EPPA no-polygraph rule, and the OSHA reporting deadlines. At 11 employees you pick up OSHA injury and illness recordkeeping. At 15 you pick up Title VII, the ADA and GINA, which is where a written anti-harassment and accommodation procedure stops being optional in practice. At 20, the ADEA and COBRA. At 50, the FMLA and the ACA employer mandate. At 100, WARN. State law frequently covers employers well below the federal thresholds, several states starting at a single employee.

Yes, unless you had 10 or fewer employees at all times during the last calendar year. This is the single most-often-wrong claim in contractor handbooks, and it is worth being precise about. There are two separate partial exemptions from routine OSHA recordkeeping: a size exemption in 29 CFR 1904.1 and an industry exemption in 29 CFR 1904.2. The industry exemption works off a list — Appendix A to Subpart B of Part 1904 — which contains 92 NAICS codes running from 4412 to 8139, mostly retail, finance, insurance and professional services. No code beginning with 23 appears anywhere on it. Construction, including NAICS 238 specialty trade contractors and 2382 electrical and plumbing-heating-air-conditioning contractors, is not partially exempt by industry. So the only exemption available to a trade contractor is the size one, and it is stricter than it looks: 1904.1(b)(1) counts the entire company rather than an establishment, and (b)(2) uses peak employment during the last calendar year. Hitting eleven employees for one week of a busy season means keeping records for the whole of the next year. And whatever your size, 1904.2(a) says expressly that partially exempt employers still have to report a fatality within 8 hours and an in-patient hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye within 24.

$684 a week, which is $35,568 a year, with the highly compensated employee threshold at $107,432. That is the 2019 rule's level, and the reason it is worth spelling out is that a lot of published guidance still carries the 2024 numbers. The April 2024 final rule raised the level to $844 a week and scheduled a second step to $1,128; on 15 November 2024 the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated that rule nationwide, and the Department of Labor has applied the 2019 level ever since, removing the vacated regulatory text by technical amendment on 14 May 2026. Two further cautions. First, the salary level is only one of the tests — the employee also has to meet the duties test for the executive, administrative or professional exemption, and a working foreman who spends most of the day with tools in hand generally does not. Second, several states set a higher salary threshold than the federal one, and where they do, theirs applies. Check dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime/salary-levels before you print a figure.

No. Wages are a core term and condition of employment, so employees discussing their pay with each other is protected concerted activity under NLRA section 7, and a policy prohibiting it violates section 8(a)(1). This holds for non-supervisory employees of almost any private employer whether or not there is a union in the building — the NLRA is not a union-shops-only statute. It also holds for a rule that merely chills the discussion rather than banning it outright, and for an informal instruction from a supervisor that never appears in writing. Supervisors as defined in NLRA section 2(11) are excluded from the definition of "employee", so a confidentiality rule binding only supervisors sits outside the analysis, but everyone else on a trade contractor's payroll is covered. The same reasoning is why overbroad confidentiality, non-disparagement and social-media rules fail: under Stericycle, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 113, a facially neutral rule is presumptively unlawful if it has a reasonable tendency to chill section 7 activity, and the employer must show a legitimate and substantial business interest that no more narrowly tailored rule could serve. This builder screens the clauses you write for those four families and flags them rather than printing them silently.

It can, and that is the risk the disclaimer exists to manage. At-will employment is state common law, not federal, and in most states a handbook that describes a fixed progressive-discipline sequence, a probationary period that "converts" an employee to permanent status, or an exhaustive list of the reasons someone may be terminated can be read as an implied contract limiting the employer's right to discharge. The fix is consistent everywhere: an explicit at-will statement, a line saying the handbook is not a contract and may be changed at any time, a no-oral-modification clause naming who does have authority to alter the at-will relationship, discretionary language in the discipline policy, and a signed acknowledgement kept in the personnel file. This builder prints all of those as their own export page. Montana is the exception worth knowing about — under the Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act, an employee who has completed the probationary period may be discharged only for good cause, and where the employer sets no probationary period at hire the statute supplies one of six months.

Not under federal law, and that is a precise answer rather than a loose one. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not require meal periods or rest breaks; where a state sets one, the state rule prevails over the federal silence. There is no federal paid sick leave requirement for a private employer either — Executive Order 13706 provides up to seven days, but it binds federal contractors and only for hours worked on or in connection with covered contracts. What that means in practice is that both of these are state and sometimes city questions, and the rules differ in ways a template cannot paper over: accrual rates, caps, carry-over, permitted uses, whether a meal period must be unpaid and uninterrupted, and what the hours-worked trigger is. So this handbook names them in a state supplement and leaves them blank with the reason on the page. The one federal break rule that does apply is break time for nursing employees under FLSA section 7(r), which reaches FLSA-covered employers of any size with a narrow undue-hardship exception below 50 employees.

No, and conflating the two tests is one of the most common handbook errors. Coverage and eligibility are separate. An employer is covered if it employs 50 or more employees for each working day during each of 20 or more calendar workweeks in the current or preceding calendar year, under 29 CFR 825.104(a). An individual employee is eligible only if they have been employed for at least 12 months, have 1,250 hours of service in the previous 12 months, and work at a site where the employer employs 50 or more employees within 75 miles, under 825.110(a). That last condition catches contractors specifically: a company of eighty people is covered, but a four-person crew working out of a satellite yard a hundred miles from the main shop may have no eligible employees at all. Entitlement, where it applies, is 12 workweeks in a 12-month period, or 26 for military caregiver leave. Write the handbook so both tests are visible, because an employee who reads "we are an FMLA employer" and requests leave they are not eligible for has been misled by your own document.

Because filling them in would be inventing law. Paid sick leave, meal and rest breaks, final-pay timing on separation, PTO payout, minimum wage, fair-employment coverage thresholds and mandated leaves are all state creations, they differ substantially, and several of them change every year. A final-pay deadline is the clearest case: depending on the state it runs from the day of discharge to the next regular payday, often with a different rule for a voluntary quit, and several states impose a per-day penalty for lateness. A template that printed one number would put a wrong deadline on a real termination in most of the country. So the state supplement names eight categories, states on the page why each is blank, and points you at your own state labour department. Being told exactly what is missing and why is more useful than a confident wrong answer — and it is the only honest thing a national template can do here.

No, and every export says so. A handbook is compliant only once it describes what your company actually does, in your state, at your size — and once the policies in it are implemented rather than merely written. This builder gives you the correct thresholds with the statutes attached, computes which of them apply to your headcount, flags the clause families that get handbooks struck down, and refuses to guess at state law. It is not reviewed or approved by DOL, EEOC, OSHA or the NLRB, and it is not legal advice. Before you distribute it, have the at-will wording, the discipline policy and any confidentiality, non-disparagement or social-media clause reviewed by an employment lawyer licensed in your state — those are the four places where template language does real damage.