Federal brief
Withdrawal of 2023 Standard for Determining Joint Employer Status
The NLRB takes its court-vacated 2023 joint-employer rule out of the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the 2020 text, which requires substantial direct and immediate control. Effective February 27, 2026. FR 2026-03955.
A federal judge in Texas threw out the National Labor Relations Board’s 2023 joint-employer rule in March 2024, before it ever took effect. Nearly two years later, the Board formally took the vacated text off its books.
The timeline from the notice: the Board published the 2023 rule on October 27, 2023, to replace a 2020 rule on when two companies count as joint employers of the same workers. A challenge, Chamber of Commerce v. NLRB, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on November 19, 2023, and the court vacated the rule on March 8, 2024. Because the 2023 rule never took effect, the 2020 rule stayed in force. The February 27, 2026, rule puts the 2020 text back into 29 CFR 103.40.
What the restored standard says: a company can be a joint employer of another employer’s workers only if the two share or codetermine the workers’ essential terms and conditions of employment, defined as wages, benefits, hours of work, hiring, discharge, discipline, supervision and direction. The company must have and use “substantial direct and immediate control” over at least one of them. Indirect control, or contract rights it never used, counts only to the extent it backs up evidence of direct and immediate control. Whoever claims a joint-employer relationship carries the burden of proof.
Board Member Prouty joined in restoring the text to follow the court’s order, but he noted that he does not believe the 2020 rule sets the proper standard. The Board called its action ministerial, skipped notice and comment for good cause, and made it effective on publication.
Contact: Roxanne L. Rothschild, Executive Secretary, (202) 273-1940 or toll-free 1-844-762-NLRB (6572) (RIN 3142-AA21). The rule is dated February 25, 2026.
Federal Register filing: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/02/27/2026-03955/withdrawal-of-2023-standard-for-determining-joint-employer-status
This is a Notice Nearby publisher-desk Federal brief — a short in-house summary of a public federal filing. It is not official agency minutes, not a newspaper story, and not Legal Publication. It does not satisfy a statutory notice requirement.
Source: the official public federal record 2026-03955 · Federal Register · 2026-03955 · 2026-03955.
This is a Notice Nearby publisher-desk Federal brief — a short in-house summary of a public federal filing. It is not official agency minutes, not a newspaper story, and not Legal Publication. It does not satisfy a statutory notice requirement.