Is jury duty pay a fringe benefit or regular pay?

Plan excludes fringe benefits from definition of compensation.  Is jury duty pay included or excluded from plan compensation?  I have not been able to find anything definitive.  Thanks!

Normally, the county of the court pays jury service comp.  Perhaps you could add some context or more description to your inquiry?

I've always thought of fringe as not in any way related to service (how much of it there was or how good/valuable it was).  Examples of where this holds true for taxable fringes are: GTL, Opting out of benefits, Personal Use Company Car, taxable Car allowances, etc.  Those items are not at all related to the value of the employee or how much they work.  That's what puts them on the "fringe" I guess. 

Jury duty, vacation pay, sick pay, are are all paid in lieu of service so they are related to service. 

Now third-party-sick pay is a weirder interpretation.  The benefit itself is in the form of insurance protection, via monthly premiums paid by the employer.  Receiving the benefit of that insurance has nothing to do with amount or value of the service.  When a benefit becomes due, the IRS requires it be reported on W-2, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a fringe at the outset (note that the benefit is paid by a 3rd party, the insurer--not the plan sponsor (edited, originally said "Client")). 

Anyway that's been my reliable north star.

Your local court system will usually pay a very paltry fee to a juror, sometimes as little as $15 an day.

Payments by an employer for the time that an employee is on jury duty is not extra compensation, it's just compensation for time that an employee would otherwise be at work but is not.

Compensation is what shows up on the final W-2 at the end of the year. 

If an employee has a salary of $50,000 a year and 4 days of his time during the year is spent on jury duty, his salary is still $50,000 a year.  Like annual leave or sick leave or compassionately leave etc.

I Don't understand how a plan can exclude that sort of fringe benefit. 

The IRS does not have a clear definition of "fringe benefits”. Rather, "fringe benefits" is a business term. Almost any form of wages other than regular pay can arguably be considered by an employer as a "fringe benefit" in interpreting their 401(k) plan document.

The Employer should adopt a written policy regarding whether to include "jury duty pay” as compensation under the Plan or exclude the pay” as a “fringe benefit”. You can go either way. But adopt a policy and then be consistent in how you apply the policy.

Perhaps there is something else behind this question.  Note that ERs cannot forbid an EE's attendance for jury service.  However, there are some ERs that require the EE to "turn in" the jury service pay, and the ER then pays the full "regular" pay.  If this practice (and I don't know how common it may be) somehow found its way to the EE's tax form (W-2) with a distinction for that jury pay, then YES, it is part of W-2 comp, but it might be information only; it would be a good idea to inquire if it is already included in the taxable income already shown on the W-2.  I cannot think of a good reason why the ER would want to bother showing it separately; it does not really add useful information and probably creates confusion (e.g., the original question above).  Perhaps other readers can offer describe whether this practice is still common, and under what circumstances.

There is this thing from the IRS.  IT' a good place to look and see if your fringe in question is even mentioned.  The word "jury" is not found anywhere in this publication.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b

I think because the IRS has no consistent definition of "fringe benefits," as pointed out by JRN and others above, it's up to the plan administrator to interpret the plan in a consistent manner as to what items are or are not "fringe benefits" for purposes of a plan definition of compensation that excludes them.