Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, EXPERT INSIGHTS—Religious accommodation requests for weekends off are surging: practical strategies for retail employers, (Jul 17, 2026)

By Brian Balonick, LaKisha M. Kinsey-Sallis, Frank F. Martinez of Fisher Phillips LLP

Retail employers are facing a sharp rise in requests for Saturdays and Sundays off as a religious accommodation, just as the legal standard for denying those requests has gotten tougher and the EEOC has made the issue an enforcement priority. This combination is forcing retail leaders to solve a problem that does not have an easy formula: the law requires every accommodation request to be evaluated individually, but retail staffing typically runs on standardized models often built across hundreds of stores. This Insight lays out why both large and small retailers are seeing this surge now and provides practical strategies for building a legally compliant process.

Why is This Happening Now?

Two forces are converging to create an unusually dangerous dynamic for retail employers:

• Supreme Court Raised Bar for Employers: First, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Groff v. DeJoy raised the bar for denying a religious accommodation under Title VII. Employers used to be able to deny a request by showing it would cost more than a trivial amount. After Groff, the standard is “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of the business.” That’s a meaningfully higher bar that has made it harder for employers to say no and easier for employees to win when they sue.

• EEOC Prioritizes Religion: Second, the EEOC has made religious accommodation an enforcement priority. We flagged this shift when Andrea Lucas was named Chair of the EEOC. Our analysis of her early priorities noted she was already vowing to focus on “protecting workers from religious bias and harassment,” and a companion Insight that same week warned employers that religious accommodation requests might need to be considered anew. Those warnings became policy once the agency regained its full quorum in late 2025 and specifically named expanded religious rights enforcement among the top developments. Indeed, just last month the EEOC released a new National Enforcement Plan that specifically highlighted claims involving the application or scope of the Supreme Court’s Groff decision.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The numbers tell that story clearly:

• The EEOC tripled its religious discrimination lawsuit filings between fiscal year 2024 (only 4 were filed) and fiscal year 2025 (where we saw 11 filed). This might seem like a low figure, but it’s worth noting that overall litigation from the EEOC has been trending downward for the past decade, so this jump stands out.

• Monetary recoveries for religious workers jumped 146% from FY 2024 to FY 2025, from $19 million to $46.8 million.

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Case in Point

A recent EEOC lawsuit spells out exactly why this risk is real for your organization. The agency just sued Dolgencorp LLC, the operator of Dollar General stores, in March after it claims a Georgia location demoted an assistant store manager because of his Sabbath observance. The lawsuit alleges that the employee had worked the accommodated schedule successfully for months before a new store manager unwound it. Litigation is ongoing.

Some Risky Employer Practices After Groff

Looking at legal decisions and EEOC guidance over the past several years, some patterns emerge when it comes to analyzing what excuses will not fly when it comes to turning down a religious accommodation request involving days off.

• Pointing to overtime costs as a reason to deny accommodation requests is not automatically a winning argument. The Supreme Court was explicit that infrequent OT payments, on their own, are not enough to establish undue hardship.

• A coworker’s general dislike of accommodating a colleague’s schedule is not enough either.

• Nor is the impact on coworkers if it does not translate into a real impact on business operations.

A blanket “we already have enough accommodations at this location” policy is also not a substitute for an accommodation analysis.

Potential Reasons to Deny an Accommodation Request

Instead, the employer has to show any burden created by the proposed accommodation request is substantial in the context of its own particular business. The Supreme Court was clear that this analysis has to account for the nature, size, and operating cost of the specific employer, so what counts as substantial for a five-person store may not be substantial for a 200-location chain. Here are some factors that carry more weight in this analysis:

• A documented, recurring coverage gap in a safety-critical or licensed role. If the accommodation would leave a shift without anyone certified to operate specific equipment, or below a legally required staffing minimum, that’s a concrete operational fact, not a generalization.

• A conflict with a binding obligation to a third party, such as a collective bargaining agreement’s seniority provisions or a contractual staffing commitment, where honoring the accommodation would require violating that separate obligation.

• A pattern across multiple simultaneous accommodations at the same location that, taken together, genuinely cannot be resolved through swaps, cross-training, or flexible scheduling—but only after you can show you actually tried those tools first and documented why they fell short for this specific combination of requests.

• A measurable, specific cost tied to your particular business, not a hypothetical or occasional one. A single-location retailer with a thin margin and no bench of cross-trained staff is in a different position than a national chain with scheduling flexibility across a district—and the analysis has to reflect that real difference.

Practical Accommodation Tools Before Saying No

Let’s say you have determined that an employee’s request for weekends off will not be reasonable under the individualized circumstances at play. Before you inform your worker they’re out of luck, retailers should consider several other options, even if they are not ultimately used:

• Voluntary shift swaps and substitutions, which courts and the EEOC have long treated as a reasonable accommodation when structured properly.

• Installing flexible scheduling software (including ones harnessing AI tools) that can surface coverage gaps and identify willing trade partners faster than a manager working a printed schedule.

• Cross-training that widens the pool of employees who can cover a given shift, reducing how concentrated the impact of any one accommodation becomes.

• Lateral transfer to a comparable role or location with a schedule that better fits the employee’s observance, where one exists and if the employee is open to it.

Building an Accommodation Intake Process

An overall fix is building a process that lets your company consistently handle individualized assessment without leaving it to whichever manager happens to be on shift when the request comes in.

• Standardize the intake. A short, consistent request form capturing which days are needed, how often, and whether there is any flexibility (some employees need every Saturday off, others can work occasionally and trade) turns a vague conversation into something the company can actually evaluate and compare.

• Centralize the tracking. When HR or legal can see accommodation requests across a district, not just at one store, the company can spot a brewing concentration problem early and plan around it, rather than discovering it the week a schedule breaks.

• Define an escalation point. When multiple requests collide at one location, there should be a clear, documented person or team who reviews the combined picture, not a store manager improvising under pressure.

Manager Talking Points

Your district and regional managers need to understand the legal shift in posture since Groff, which can be summarized simply:

• Before, a manager could reasonably say “unless someone can cover your shift, we can’t redo the schedule.”

• Now, the first response should be “let’s talk about this,” followed by a real conversation about alternatives before anyone reaches for a denial.

In other words, the post-Groff standard rewards employers acting with specificity and usually punishes those operating off generalizations.

A few principles worth putting in front of every DM and RM:

• Multiple requests at one store do not, by themselves, justify denying any of them.

• “We’ve already accommodated enough people” is not a legal standard and should not be treated as one internally.

• Every denial needs documented, specific, business-grounded reasoning, not a general sense that the schedule is getting harder to manage.

• When in doubt, escalate before denying. A quick conversation with HR or legal is far cheaper than an EEOC charge.

A Quick Note on State and Local Law

Everything above addresses the federal Title VII standard, but a growing number of states and local municipalities impose their own religious accommodation requirements, some of which are more protective than federal law. Always check state and local rules before finalizing a scheduling policy or denying a request.

Conclusion

We will continue to monitor developments and provide updates as warranted. Make sure you are subscribed to Fisher Phillips’ Insight System to get the most up-to-date information direct to your inbox. If you have questions, contact your Fisher Phillips attorney, the authors of this Insight, or any attorney on our Retail Industry Team.

Fisher Phillips

URL: https://www.fisherphillips.com/

Attorneys: (FisherPhillips).

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