Minnesota makes you hand every new employee a signed written notice

By David J.S. Madgett

Minnesota attorney, license no. 390494 · Published August 7, 2026

Almost every new Minnesota employer sends an offer letter. Far fewer deliver the written notice that Minn. Stat. § 181.032 actually requires at the start of employment, and fewer still keep the signed copy.

It is a small piece of paper with outsized consequences, because it is documentary. When a wage dispute arrives years later, the question is not what you meant to pay — it is what you can show you told them, and whether you have their signature on it.

What the notice must contain

Paragraph (d) requires, among other things:

• “the rate or rates of pay and basis thereof, including whether the employee is paid by the hour, shift, day, week, salary, piece, commission, or other method”;
• “paid vacation, sick time, or other paid time-off accruals and terms of use”;
• “the employee’s employment status and whether the employee is exempt from minimum wage, overtime” and other provisions; and
• “the number of days in the pay period, the regularly scheduled pay day, and the pay day on which the employee will receive the first payment of wages earned.”

Look at the second and third items together. You are required to state, in writing, at hiring, both your paid-time-off terms and whether you are treating this person as exempt. Those are precisely the two things employers most often get wrong and most often cannot later prove they communicated. The statute makes you commit to both on day one.

It has to be signed, and kept

Paragraph (e): “The employer must keep a copy of the notice under paragraph (d) signed by each employee acknowledging receipt of the notice.”

An unsigned notice in a folder is not compliance. Neither is a paragraph buried on page 14 of a handbook. The obligation is to produce a document, have it signed, and retain it.

Language

The notice is provided in English, and on request “shall provide the notice in the language requested by the employee.” If you employ people whose first language is not English, this is not a nicety — it is the statute.

Every pay period, too

Separately, paragraph (b) requires each earnings statement to include, among other items, “the total amount of gross pay earned by the employee during that period,” “a list of deductions made from the employee’s pay,” and “the net amount of pay after all deductions are made.”

A payroll provider handles this correctly by default. An employer paying by hand-written check, which describes a great many new Minnesota businesses in their first year, frequently does not.

The practical version

• Draft the notice once, properly, and use it for every hire. It is a template you build a single time.
• Get it signed on or before the first day and file the signed copy where you will still be able to find it in five years.
• Re-issue it when the terms change — a raise, a change in exempt status, a new PTO policy.
• Decide exempt status deliberately, because you are about to put it in writing. If you are not certain, that is a sign to ask before you sign, not after.
• Use a payroll service if you possibly can. The per-pay-period requirements are exactly the sort of thing that is free to get right at setup and expensive to reconstruct later.

Related: earned sick and safe time, whose accrual terms are one of the things this very notice has to describe.