Key Takeaways:

• With its decision in Groff v. DeJoy, the Supreme Court has ruled that an employer must demonstrate granting a religious accommodation would result in substantial increased costs to the employer to justify an accommodation denial.
• The 9-0 decision nullified a line of lower court cases permitting an employer to deny a religious accommodation if it could show that accommodation would cause a cost that is more than de minimis, or minimal. 
• As a result of the Groff decision, it will now be more difficult for employers to deny employees religious accommodations.

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States revisited an employer's obligation to provide religious accommodations under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), heightening the standard employers will have to meet to deny such an accommodation. In Groff v. DeJoy, the Supreme Court rejected the standard that had been adopted by lower courts in previous cases, whereby an employer only had to demonstrate that the accommodation would cause a cost that is more than “de minimis” to justify denying the requested accommodation. Going forward, employers will have to show that granting an accommodation would result in “substantial increased costs” to the employer to successfully defend the denial of a religious accommodation.

Groff concerned whether the United States Postal Service (USPS) violated Title VII by failing to provide one of its Evangelical Christian employees an accommodation from working on Sundays. Title VII requires employers to accommodate the religious practices of their employees unless doing so would impose an “undue hardship” on the employer’s business. Groff sued USPS after he received progressive discipline for refusing to work on Sundays and eventually resigned from his employment. In reliance on the Supreme Court’s decision in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63 (1977), many lower courts across the United States had interpreted “undue hardship” in the Title VII context as any effort or cost that is more than “de minimis,” or, as the Supreme Court put it in Groff, more than “very small or trifling.” Following this line of cases, the District Court granted summary judgment to USPS and the Third Circuit affirmed.

The Supreme Court reversed the Third Circuit’s ruling. It noted that the limited interpretation of “undue hardship” that had developed in the lower courts was premised on a misinterpretation of Hardison, and that the Hardison Court made clear that an accommodation under Title VII is not required when it entails “substantial” costs or expenditures. The Supreme Court therefore rejected the “more than de minimis” standard. Instead, the Supreme Court found that an employer must “show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.” The Court emphasized that this “fact-specific inquiry” properly focuses on “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 Supreme Court also made clear that in assessing undue hardship, the impacts on the rest of the employer’s workforce must ultimately impact the employer’s business to be considered in the accommodation analysis, and a coworker’s animosity to a particular religion does not satisfy the undue burden standard.

The Supreme Court did not reach the underlying merits of Groff’s claim, instead opting to remand the case back to the District Court for further proceedings. That remand deprived the lower courts of additional guidance into the revamped undue burden standard, so we expect the lower courts to continue to grapple with issues related to what constitutes an undue burden. In particular, the Groff decision is likely to provide fodder for employees challenging workplace vaccination requirements as those legal challenges continue to make their way through U.S. courts. While further case law will need to develop to determine what constitutes an undue burden for employers under Title VII, the Groff decision places a heightened burden on employers to justify denying religious accommodations to their employees.