Remote work promised flexibility, but it also quietly shifted costs onto employees. The assumption that you’d cover your own phone plan, internet connection, and maybe a few office supplies became so normal that many workers stopped questioning it. A recent class action settlement suggests that assumption was worth challenging: engineering firm HNTB agreed to repay $490,000 in phone and internet costs to several hundred California employees who worked from home over a four-year period. That number is a concrete reminder that remote work expenses aren’t just a personal inconvenience — they’re a legal and financial issue with real stakes.
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The $490,000 Question: What Was Actually Covered
In March 2022, former project controls manager Matthew Morel filed a class action against HNTB Corp., seeking compensation for the costs employees absorbed while working remotely. The case didn’t drag on for years. By January, a federal judge in San Diego had tentatively approved a settlement under which the firm agreed to repay $490,000 in phone and internet costs.
The repayment covers several hundred California employees who worked from home across a four-year stretch that included the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. A final hearing on settlement terms was scheduled for July. That timeline matters — it tells you that this wasn’t a years-long battle. The case moved relatively quickly, which suggests the legal question wasn’t as fuzzy as many employers might hope.
What’s worth noting here is what the settlement doesn’t cover. It’s limited to phone and internet costs. It doesn’t address electricity, home office furniture, printer ink, or the countless other expenses that pile up when your living room doubles as a cubicle. The settlement is narrow, but it establishes a principle: some of those costs are the employer’s responsibility, not yours.
The Expense That’s Easy to Ignore
Phone and internet bills are easy to overlook because they feel personal. You’d have a phone plan and an internet connection whether you worked from home or not. That’s the argument employers lean on most often — and it sounds reasonable until you look at the actual numbers.
A remote worker’s internet plan isn’t the same as a household plan. Higher bandwidth, reliable uptime, and sometimes a business-grade line cost more. The same goes for a phone plan when you’re using it for work calls, two-factor authentication, and client communication all day. The difference between a personal plan and one that actually supports remote work is real money.
What’s harder to measure is the emotional weight. Every time you see your internet bill and remember that a chunk of it is for work — work that pays you, but doesn’t cover that cost — it grates. It’s not the amount alone. It’s the feeling that you’re subsidizing your own job. The HNTB settlement validates that feeling as a real legal grievance, not just a personal annoyance.
The practical consequence is straightforward: if your employer requires you to work remotely, and you’re incurring costs you wouldn’t otherwise have, those costs are compensable. At least in California. The question is whether you’re tracking them.
California’s Labor Code and Why It Matters
California law requires employers to reimburse workers for all necessary expenditures incurred in the course of their duties. That’s not a fuzzy guideline — it’s written into the state’s labor code. The HNTB case didn’t create a new legal theory; it applied an existing one to the remote work context.
What made this case possible was that California treats remote work expenses as a straightforward extension of the employer’s obligation. If you’re required to have a working phone and internet connection to do your job, and you’re not using a company-provided device or plan, the employer owes you for that cost. The logic is simple, but the application is where things get messy.
The mistake most remote workers make is assuming they need to prove their employer explicitly refused to pay. In California, the burden is on the employer to show they didn’t incur the expense, not on you to prove you did. But here’s the complication: if you never asked for reimbursement, and you never documented the expense, it’s much harder to make a claim stick later. The settlement covers a period where many employees simply didn’t think to ask — and that’s exactly the pattern that leaves money on the table.
This case also highlights a timing consideration. The covered period included the pandemic years, when many employees started working from home under emergency conditions. Policies were loose, expectations were unclear, and nobody thought about expense tracking. That’s exactly the kind of scenario where employees end up absorbing costs that should have been covered by their employer.
What If You Don’t Live in California?
California’s labor code is among the strongest in the country when it comes to employee expense reimbursement. Other states have weaker protections, and some have none at all. If you’re working remotely in a state without a clear reimbursement statute, the legal landscape shifts.
Some states follow the federal Fair Labor Standards Act framework, which doesn’t explicitly require reimbursement for remote work expenses. Others have laws that cover specific categories but not the full range of costs. The practical result is that your rights depend heavily on where you’re physically located, not where your employer is based.
There’s a common misunderstanding that remote work protections follow the employer’s headquarters. They don’t. Your rights are generally determined by the state where you perform the work. That means if you live in California but work for a company based in Texas, California law still applies to your remote work conditions. The reverse is also true — and that’s where remote workers in states with weaker protections need to be more proactive.
I’ve written more about how remote work stipends interact with your legal rights, and the difference between a voluntary perk and a mandatory reimbursement. It’s worth understanding the distinction because a stipend can be changed or removed, but a reimbursement obligation is harder for an employer to walk away from.
If you’re in a state without strong reimbursement laws, the strategy shifts. You’re not relying on the statute — you’re relying on your employment agreement, company policy, and the precedent set by cases like this one. The HNTB settlement doesn’t set a national legal standard, but it creates a conversation that’s harder for employers to ignore.
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Three Steps to Protecting Your Reimbursement Rights
Whether you live in California or not, there are practical moves you can make now — before you need to make a claim. Waiting until you’re frustrated about a bill or until you leave the job is the wrong time to start documenting.
- Track your actual costs. Pull your phone and internet bills from the last year. Calculate the difference between a personal plan and what you’d need for work. If you upgraded your plan after going remote, that’s a clear cost you can attribute to work.
- Review your company’s expense policy. Most companies have a written policy on reimbursable expenses. If yours is silent on phone and internet, that’s a gap worth raising. If it explicitly excludes them, you know where you stand — and you can decide whether to push back.
- Keep a simple log. Note the date you started working remotely, any equipment you bought, and any service upgrades you made. A spreadsheet with dates and amounts is enough. You don’t need a formal system, but you do need a record.
If you’re already in a situation where you’re covering costs and your employer hasn’t offered reimbursement, you have options. The first is to ask. A simple email to HR or your manager — “I’ve been covering my own internet and phone costs since going remote, and I’d like to discuss reimbursement” — starts the conversation without burning anything. If they say no, you have documentation of the request, which matters if the situation escalates.
For employees who’ve faced changes to their compensation or working conditions, there are specific protections around salary changes while working from home that are worth knowing. The HNTB case is part of a broader pattern where remote workers are asserting rights that existed all along but weren’t being enforced.
The other angle worth considering is the connection between wage laws and remote work expenses. If an employer requires you to cover costs that effectively reduce your hourly earnings below minimum wage, that creates a separate legal issue. The expense reimbursement question can intersect with wage and hour law in ways that give employees more leverage than they realize.
The HNTB settlement doesn’t change the law. What it does is show that the law can work — that a group of employees who didn’t think to ask for reimbursement can recover nearly half a million dollars after the fact. The question is whether you’re going to wait for a settlement to happen to you, or whether you’ll start tracking your costs now. The difference between those two paths is a few minutes of documentation and one conversation you’re probably avoiding.