Religious Accommodation After Groff
A brief-ready walkthrough of Groff v. DeJoy’s "substantial increased costs" standard for religious accommodation — what employers must now prove, why speculative hardship fails at summary judgment, and how courts treat scheduling accommodations and shift swaps.
The "Substantial Increased Costs" Standard for Undue Hardship
Groff replaced a generation of "de minimis" case law with a real burden: "what an employer must show is that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business," applying a test that "take[s] into account all relevant factors in the case at hand, including the particular accommodations at issue and their practical impact in light of the nature, size, and operating cost of an employer." The Court held that "showing ‘more than a de minimis cost’ . . . does not suffice to establish ‘undue hardship’ under Title VII." Groff v. DeJoy, 600 U.S. 447 (2023). Two limits matter for scheduling disputes: "[i]mpacts on coworkers are relevant only to the extent those impacts go on to affect the conduct of the business," and "a hardship that is attributable to employee animosity to a particular religion, to religion in general, or to the very notion of accommodating religious practice, cannot be considered ‘undue.’"
The Eighth Circuit has shown how demanding the evidentiary burden is at summary judgment. Reversing judgment for a county employer, Dean Naylor v. County of Muscatine, 151 F.4th 973 (8th Cir. 2025) required that any asserted hardship be "real rather than speculative, merely conceivable, or hypothetical," and held that evidence that contract partners "might" walk away was "insufficient to show as a matter of law that the County’s business relationships were so imperiled" that accommodation would cause undue hardship: "any loss of contractual relationships appears speculative from the evidence the County presented," with one entity merely having "conversations" about termination and another warning only that it "may" have to do the same.
For scheduling accommodations specifically, the pre-Groff EEOC guidance survives with new force. Maki v. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 784 F. Supp. 3d 1191 (D. Minn. 2025) explained that Groff "preserve[d] EEOC guidance that ‘no undue hardship is imposed by temporary costs, voluntary shift swapping, occasional shift swapping, or administrative costs’ . . . if voluntary shift swapping was not an undue hardship under the de minimis standard, it is not an undue hardship under the ‘substantial increased costs’ standard." The court also fixed the evidentiary window at the moment of decision: "information not known to an employer when it decides not to accommodate an employee is irrelevant to determining whether granting the requested accommodation would impose an undue hardship."
The brief section, then, writes itself in three moves. First, state the rule from Groff and its statutory anchor in 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(j) — the employer must "reasonably accommodate" religious practice, and Groff adds that an employer "must do more than conclude that forcing other employees to work overtime would constitute an undue hardship. Consideration of other options would also be necessary." Second, hold the employer to contemporaneous, concrete proof — dollar figures, staffing data, operational impact — because speculation fails under Naylor. Third, walk through the alternatives the employer never considered: voluntary swaps, schedule shuffles, temporary coverage. Under Groff, skipping that analysis is itself the violation.