Your pager buzzes you awake in the dead of night, an alert in one of your systems demands your attention. You manage to identify the issue and apply a fix in twelve minutes flat.
We as a society have chosen to accept this as a standard behavior, we've even assigned a positive term to it - ownership.
The word "ownership" is doing a lot of work
As we enter the middle of 2026, a debate is heating up about whether on-call is unpaid overtime or merely a salary premium. I believe it's all in how you frame it.
Being on-call with a pager constantly isn't a responsibility. It's a job. And calling it "taking ownership" washes that job of work into an attribute of one's character.
You're not exhausted because you didn't get enough sleep. You're exhausted because you invest so much energy into what you do. Catch my drift?
The law was basically written to let this happen
Here's the part they don't tell you during the standup meeting. According to FLSA Section 13(a)(1) and 13(a)(17), software engineers who make at least $684 a week are not eligible for overtime pay and minimum wage protections.
That equals $35,568 a year. If you exceed that threshold, any additional time you put in at the office comes without compensation. Hooray! 🎉
It becomes more defined. The Department of Labor actually classifies standby as "engaged to wait" (paid) and "waiting to be engaged" (not paid).
Since you can answer from anywhere with a laptop, your on-call is equivalent to "waiting to be engaged." The very part about on-call that sucks, being able to be reached from anywhere, is the part that isn't compensated.
The "$150k is your hazard pay" defense
The most common response from the industry is that you are already being compensated for this with your higher salary. In an October 2025 commentary, tech blog ThatSoftwareDude wrote that the salary premium "isn't just for your technical skills, it's hazard pay for being perpetually on standby."
They continued: "Businesses realize this truth, although they may not admit it openly." I must say, I find this statement to be quite accurate.
But notice what "hazard pay baked in" really means. It means uncapped, unmeasured, and invisible. You can't audit a number nobody wrote down.
Now, let's put this into perspective with actual numbers that people are familiar with. For example, Incident.io reported in February 2026 that flat payments ranging from $200 to $500 per week just for being on-call are typical. In a Rootly report from November 2025, the range is between $500 and $1,200 per month.
According to The Pragmatic Engineer's research, with stricter labor laws in Europe, companies are willing to pay around €1,000 per week for your availability, with per-incident hourly rates on top of that. The work didn't change, just the willingness to pay for it.
The pager is now the reason people quit
Kit Merker, COO of Nobl9 said it best, "People used to quit managers, now they quit on-call rotations." He referenced explicit mandates like being required to stay within 15 minutes of your computer at all times.
Having only fifteen minutes of freedom isn't something that can be considered a job benefit; it's more like being monitored electronically with a Slack integration.
According to the guidance in The Google SRE Workbook, a sustainable shift should include 2 to 3 incidents that an engineer can take action on. If there are more than that, the engineer can easily experience burnout.
Now imagine the developer forum threads in which devs on-call page ops for anything. Most rotations exceed that limit, not because the systems are difficult, but because it costs the dev nothing to page someone and costs the op a night's sleep.
Money doesn't actually fix the peace-of-mind part
Here's the catch I can't seem to get over. It doesn't fix it even with the paid version.
Merker also pointed out that even when companies "give engineers hazard pay or bonuses for these on-call rotations, it doesn't make up the difference in lost peace of mind and family time." So the right response isn't just "pay people more."
You can't pay your way out of all of those problems.
→ Pay for the standby. The waiting is labor even when nothing breaks.
→ Cap the load. Honor the 2-to-3 incident line or the money is just an apology.
→ Make paging cost something. If firing an alert is free, people will fire alerts.
Pay fixes the accounting. Load fixes the human. You need both.
The takeaway
The compensation standards for being on call obfuscate institutionalized unpaid labor as a rite of passage. The solution isn't larger sums of money that disappear in the wash, it's calling that on-call what it is, quantifying it, and not allowing the waiting to go uncounted.
So let me be direct - Are you paid a fixed amount for being on-call and are you willing to give up $500 a week for the opportunity to get a full night's sleep instead?
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