Oregon Acts to Ensure Fundamental Labor Rights for Home Care Workers
Oregon has taken the important step of codifying basic labor protections for home care workers in response to looming federal rollbacks. On March 3, 2026, Governor Tina Kotek signed SB 1518 into law, ensuring that Oregon home care workers will continue to have rights to minimum wage and overtime pay under state law, even as the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) proposes to strip these same protections under federal law. The lesson from Oregon is simple: when federal protections are under threat, states need to act.
Background: Federal Policy Changes Threaten to Reverse Progress
In 2025, the DOL proposed a rule that would reverse a decade of progress under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by reinstating an exemption that once denied home care workers the right to minimum wages and overtime pay. The DOL’s proposed rollback would effectively deem home care work unworthy of the labor rights extended to virtually every other American worker. On top of the proposed rulemaking, the DOL has already instructed its field staff to stop enforcing home care workers’ existing FLSA protections while the rule is pending.
What Oregon’s Law Does
While Oregon’s home care workers already had stronger labor protections than federal law affords, the state’s 2015 Domestic Workers Protection Act referenced federal definitions that the DOL’s proposed rule could undermine. SB 1518 fixes that vulnerability by decoupling Oregon’s minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers from any new federal definitions. This new state law now ensures that home care workers retain the right to at least Oregon minimum wages and overtime pay, regardless of changes at the federal level. The new law also provides clarity for employers and for the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries in enforcing these labor rights—an especially important focus in the highly dispersed home care industry.
Guaranteeing fundamental labor rights for home care workers is critical to the future of care. PHI’s testimony in support of SB 1518 noted that Oregon will need to fill more than 70,000 total openings in home care between 2022 and 2032, while workers in this field continue to face serious economic insecurity and poor job quality. Stripping minimum wage and overtime protections from Oregon’s home care workers would have only deepened that precarity.
Preserving minimum wage and overtime rights will not in itself solve workforce challenges in Oregon, but this law does establish a crucial foundation upon which to build quality home care jobs, and recruit and retain a workforce capable of providing quality home-based care to older adults and people with disabilities across Oregon. The bill also sends a clear message rejecting the DOL’s misguided assertion that home care workers’ essential labor does not deserve the same basic recognition and respect as other work. Oregon correctly recognizes that valuing workers and ensuring access to care are not competing goals; they are interdependent.
A Model for Other States
Oregon’s home care workers are not alone in facing a threat from the DOL’s proposed rollbacks. Several states do not have their own minimum wage and overtime protections at all, or they exclude home care workers from these protections. Other states share the same vulnerability that Oregon addressed with this law: cross-references to federal definitions that could be weakened by federal rulemaking. Oregon’s approach of affirmatively extending state minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers offers a straightforward and replicable model.
PHI asks state lawmakers across the country to determine whether their home care workers have state-level minimum wage and overtime protections in place that are distinct from federal law. If not, it is crucial to take steps (like D.C.’s B26-0653 and Virginia’s HB238) to ensure that home care workers’ labor rights are protected under state law, while we all continue to advocate for the federal protections that are also needed (like the Fair Wages for Home Care Workers Act, H.R.7917/S.4081). No state will be able to build a successful care system if direct care workers lack basic, fundamental labor protections and respect and recognition for their contributions. The essential workers who enable older adults and people with disabilities to live safely in their homes and communities deserve nothing less than the same rights already afforded to all other workers.
