Eligibility - hourly and month requirement

[Guest tajcc]

Can an employer require an employee to work 1000 hours AND have a service requirement of 6 months?

[JanetM]

Depends. ER can say you have to work 6 months to meet eligibility to participant and you must work 1,000 hours to accrue a year of vesting credit or accrue a benefit for that year.

[Tom Poje]

there would be nothing to prevent this, but the eligibility must also contain a provision that requires the person to enter the plan if they worked 1000 hours in the 12 month period (as required by law)

in other words, in your example, a person might work 800 the first 6 months and 400 hours the next 6 months. they have failed your conditions for eligibility.

however, they have worked 1200 in a 12 month period. by law they have met the minimum eligibility standards and must enter (unless excluded for another reason)

[Guest Sieve]

Tom Poje is right. You can always use a pro-rata (or greater) hours requirement for a less-than-one-y/s eligibility requirement (like 250 hours in 3 months, or 750 hours in 3 months). But, you must always come back to the year of service (1,000 h/s in a 12-month computation period), even while also considering the plan's accelerated eligibility provision.

[masteff]

I take the question to be the latter of 6 months or 1000 hours, not "1000 hours in 6 months" (note the OP's emphasis of the word AND).

Yes, it can be faster than the minimum required by law, as long as you don't exclude someone who'd be required by the general minimum. 410(a) says a plan can't require more than 1000 hours in 12 months for a "year of service".

The problem in using both 6 months AND 1000 hours is the trouble of administering people who reach their 1000 hours sometime between months 7 and 12. If your plan entry date is the first payperiod or the first of the month following eligibility, then you'll have to continuously measure for 1000 hours for people in their first year of employment.

So you'll want to review your plan entry date in conjunction w/ this.