{"id":10150,"date":"2026-04-04T00:07:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T00:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-clarifies-undue-hardship-test-for-religious-accommodation-requests\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T00:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T00:07:15","slug":"supreme-court-clarifies-undue-hardship-test-for-religious-accommodation-requests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-clarifies-undue-hardship-test-for-religious-accommodation-requests\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Clarifies Undue Hardship Test for Religious Accommodation Requests"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On June 29, 2023, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Groff <\/i>v. DeJoy<\/i><\/a> that Title VII requires an employer who denies a religious accommodation to an employee to show that the burden of granting an accommodation would impose an \u201cundue hardship on the conduct of the employer\u2019s business\u201d and that the undue hardship is \u201csubstantial in the overall context of the employer\u2019s business.\u201d Although the Court phrased its holding as a \u201cclarification\u201d of its 1977 precedent in Trans World Airlines, Inc.<\/i> v. Hardison<\/i>, 432 U.S. 63, in practice the decision is likely to represent a significant departure from the prior understanding that \u201cundue hardship\u201d meant any cost that is \u201cmore than de minimis<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Background<\/h3>\n

The plaintiff, Gerald Groff, began working as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service (\u201cUSPS\u201d) in 2012, at a time when Sunday work was generally not required for employee\u2019s in Groff\u2019s position. By 2017, however, carriers in Groff\u2019s position were asked to begin delivering packages on Sundays. As an Evangelical Christian who believes that Sundays should be \u201cdevoted to worship and rest,\u201d Groff was unwilling to fulfill the Sunday work requirement. Accordingly, for over a year, Groff\u2019s Sunday deliveries were handled by other carriers at his station, and he faced \u201cprogressive discipline\u201d for skipping his rotation, until he resigned in January 2019. Several months later, Groff sued USPS under Title VII, arguing that USPS could have accommodated his Sunday Sabbath practice without undue hardship on the conduct of USPS\u2019s business. The District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted summary judgment to USPS, and the Third Circuit affirmed that decision.<\/p>\n

Title VII Protection for Religious Observance<\/h3>\n

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it unlawful for covered employers \u201cto fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges [of] employment, because of such individual\u2019s \u2026 religion.\u201d EEOC regulations subsequently mandated religious accommodations for employees whenever such accommodations did not create \u201cundue hardship on the conduct of the employer\u2019s business.\u201d In 1972, Congress amended Title VII to codify the language of the EEOC\u2019s regulations, requiring that employers \u201creasonably accommodate \u2026 an employee\u2019s or prospective employee\u2019s religious observance or practice\u201d except when doing so would place \u201cundue hardship on the conduct of the employer\u2019s business.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1977 case Trans World Airlines, Inc.<\/i> v. Hardison<\/i>, the Supreme Court addressed the question of whether Title VII \u201crequire[s] an employer and a union who have agreed on a seniority system to deprive senior employees of their seniority rights in order to accommodate a junior employee\u2019s religious practices.\u201d Hardison<\/i> concerned an airline maintenance worker who was fired for insubordination after missing work to observe the Sabbath. In finding that Title VII implied no such requirement, the Court stated: \u201cTo require TWA to bear more than a de minimis<\/i> cost in order to give Hardison Saturdays off is an undue hardship.\u201d Lower courts subsequently latched onto this language to interpret the statutory term \u201cundue hardship,\u201d notwithstanding other parts of the Hardison <\/i>decision in which the Court indicated that the undue hardship test was intended to be more substantial than \u201cde minimis<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Groff<\/i>, the Court sought to \u201cclarify\u201d the definition of \u201cundue hardship\u201d and the circumstances under which an employer can avoid the requirement of providing a \u201creasonable\u201d religious accommodation. Citing common parlance and various dictionaries, the Court found that a requirement of \u201chardship\u201d as defined as \u201csomething hard to bear,\u201d in combination with the qualifier \u201cundue\u201d\u2014meaning \u201cexcessive\u201d or \u201cunjustifiable\u201d\u2014cannot be fulfilled by a small or trivial burden as implied by the \u201cde minimis<\/i>\u201d standard. While declining to explicitly overturn Hardison<\/i>, the Court noted that the interpretation of that case\u2019s holding that was widely adopted by lower courts is a \u201cmistaken view,\u201d and it rejected the \u201cde minimis<\/i>\u201d standard.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Court held that an \u201cundue hardship\u201d exists \u201cwhen a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer\u2019s business,\u201d which is a \u201cfact-specific inquiry.\u201d This means that \u201ccourts must ap\u00adply the test in a manner that takes into account all relevant factors in the case at hand, including the particular accom\u00admodations at issue and their practical impact in light of the nature, \u2018size and operating cost of an employer.\u2019\u201d The Court also noted that \u201ca good deal of the EEOC\u2019s guidance in this area is sensible and will, in all likelihood, be unaffected by our clarifying decision today.\u201d It further explained that because \u201cTitle VII requires that an employer reasonably accommo\u00addate an employee\u2019s practice of religion, not merely that it assess the reasonableness of a particular possible accommo\u00addation or accommodations,\u201d when confronting a religious accommodation request such as Mr. Groff\u2019s, \u201cit would not be enough for an employer to conclude that forcing other employees to work overtime would con\u00adstitute an undue hardship. Consideration of other options, such as voluntary shift swapping, would also be necessary.\u201d The Court vacated the Court of Appeals\u2019 decision in favor of USPS and remanded the case for further consideration consistent with its Opinion.<\/p>\n

Under Groff<\/i>, an employer must identify a substantial burden\u2014not merely a de minimis<\/i> burden\u2014that would result should an employee\u2019s religious accommodation be granted.\u00a0 For decades, employers have been able to point to any de minimis<\/i> hardship to support a finding that Title VII did not require accommodation of an employee\u2019s religious practice.\u00a0 But the Groff<\/i> holding changes an employer\u2019s calculus.\u00a0 Employers must remain cognizant of the refined standard and examine closely particular facts of each case when deciding whether to grant or deny an individual\u2019s request for a religious accommodation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 29, 2023, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Groff v. DeJoy that Title VII requires an employer who denies a religious accommodation to an employee to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7645,1329,143,7644,387,1636,533,1357,7643],"class_list":["post-10150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-accommodation","tag-clarifies","tag-court","tag-hardship","tag-religious","tag-requests","tag-supreme","tag-test","tag-undue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}