New Jersey State employees have teleworked under some Civil Service Commission authority since the summer of 2020. For most of that time the authority was temporary: first an emergency rule tied to the COVID-19 executive order, then a pilot program the Commission kept extending by order. Only on November 3, 2025 did telework become an ordinary part of Title 4A, at N.J.A.C. 4A:6-7. This piece follows that path through the documents the Commission itself published, and looks at what has been decided since.
If you want to know what the rule requires today, how many days, who qualifies and how to challenge a denial, our guide to NJ State telework covers that section by section. What follows is the history behind it.
It started as an amendment to the flextime rule
On September 2, 2020, the Commission published a notice relaxing its flextime rule, N.J.A.C. 4A:6-2.6, under Executive Order No. 103, the Governor's COVID-19 emergency order. Section 6 of that order let agency heads waive or modify rules where enforcing them would harm the public during the emergency. The Commission used it to add a temporary section, 4A:6-2.8A, creating a COVID-19 Temporary Telework Program. The notice made it effective as of July 7, 2020, and set it to expire 30 days after the executive order ended.
The emergency version was short and left most choices to departments. Using it at all was discretionary. A department could limit it to certain titles, units or locations, needed the Chair's approval at least 30 days before starting, changing or ending a program, and had to give employees ten working days' notice before ending their participation. Unions came up in a single sentence: appointing authorities "should consult" with negotiations representatives before implementation. The text set no weekly limit on telework days.
The notice gave its reason plainly. Departments had moved employees home during the stay-at-home order without major disruption to services, and offices now had to reopen without putting workers at increased risk of infection.
Two years as a pilot
The next step was a Commission order, not a rule. According to the 2025 proposal, the Commission approved a Model Pilot Telework Program for State Executive Branch employees on April 6, 2022, for one year ending June 30, 2023, and amended it on July 20, 2022. Further orders followed on June 7, 2023 and May 22, 2024.
The June 2023 order is the one that set the course. The proposal says the Commission extended the pilot in order to facilitate formal rulemaking, and the CWA agreement quotes that decision as stating the "need to institute formal rule making procedures" to codify the program. The proposal also reports that two surveys run by the Commission's Center for Learning and Improving Performance, one of human resource officers and one of employees and supervisors, came back positive overall.
A union agreement fixed the order of events
On October 1, 2023, the Commission Chair and the New Jersey area director of the Communications Workers of America signed a memorandum of understanding on telework. It did three things that matter to this history.
It required the Commission, before proposing a formal rule, to meet with CWA and other unions representing affected State employees to discuss the rule's substance and implementation, including possible enforcement mechanisms. Those meetings had to start by October 15, 2023 and finish by March 15, 2024. It said the pilot was not to be diminished during the pilot period. And it set a grievance route for CWA-represented employees claiming pilot violations: the contract grievance procedure through Step Two, then an appeal to the Commission within 20 days under N.J.A.C. 4A:2-3.7, with the burden of proof on the union or employee.
The 2025 proposal describes the agreement as providing for those meetings before any formal proposal. It adds that the Commission convened a meeting with other State employee unions and received comments from CWA members asking for a permanent and expanded policy.
The proposal: the pilot, written down
The proposal appeared in the New Jersey Register on May 5, 2025, at 57 N.J.R. 865(a). It cited N.J.S.A. 11A:6-24, the Commission's general rulemaking authority, and said the new subchapter "generally mirrors" the pilot guidelines. A public hearing was set for June 9, 2025, with written comments due July 4, 2025, a 60-day period that exempted the notice from the rulemaking calendar.
The proposal named one deliberate departure from the pilot. Where the pilot said operational needs were at the "sole" discretion of the appointing authority, the proposed rule dropped the word, which the Commission said better aligned the language with its other rules. The same notice amended the curtailment rule at N.J.A.C. 4A:6-2.5 and made alternative workweek programs mandatory under N.J.A.C. 4A:6-2.7, where the old text had said departments "may" create them.
Ninety-three commenters, and how the Commission answered
The adoption notice lists 93 numbered commenters. Two CWA representatives, Tonya Hodges of District 1 and Adam Liebtag of Local 1036, spoke at the June 9 hearing; the hearing officer made no recommendations. The largest single submission came from CWA District 1 and seven CWA locals, filed on behalf of 5,633 of their members.
Most comments supported telework, and some asked for more of it, such as more than two remote days a week. The Commission's answer to that whole group was one paragraph: it considered the rule's scope appropriate "at this time" and said the rule struck a balance between in-person and remote work. Asked for exceptions to the two-day limit for field assignments or illness, it said the limit was appropriate and pointed to the reasonable accommodation process instead.
A smaller set argued the other way. Several commenters said managers and directors should not telework at all; the Commission replied that suitability depends on whether duties are portable, not on rank or union membership. One commenter, number 90 in the list and comment 54 in the response, asked whether the rulemaking was a way around the Legislature, since bills to prohibit remote work for State employees had been introduced as Senate Bill 4057 and Assembly Bill 5243. The Commission answered that N.J.S.A. 11A:6-24 gives it authority to adopt hours-of-work rules, that ending the comment period on Independence Day was permitted, and that to its knowledge the bills had not become law.
The Judiciary, through the Acting Administrative Director of the Courts, asked the Commission to confirm the new subchapter applies only to the Executive Branch. The Commission confirmed it does.
Three changes on adoption
The Commission adopted the rule on October 1, 2025, filed as R.2025 d.131 and published at 57 N.J.R. 2475(c). It took effect November 3, 2025, and carries an expiration date of August 25, 2029. The changes from the proposal were small enough that no new comment period was required.
First, the plan deadline. The proposal gave each department 60 days after the effective date to submit its written plan; the adopted text names a fixed date, January 2, 2026. Second, in response to a comment, notice an employee must give under 4A:6-7.5(b) and 4A:6-7.6(f) can go to the appointing authority or to a designee it names; the proposal had required notice to the appointing authority alone. Third, on its own initiative, the Commission rewrote N.J.A.C. 4A:6-7.5(a), on being directed to report on a scheduled telework day, so that it also covers field employees sent to the field rather than to the office.
Three decisions, none of them a telework grievance
The rule created its own challenge route at N.J.A.C. 4A:6-7.8. As of October 20, 2026, we found no published Commission decision on a grievance brought under it. The three decisions that do discuss telework all came through the discrimination appeal process at N.J.A.C. 4A:7-3.2, and two of them concern decisions made while the pilot was still running.
B.O. (Docket 2024-1615, decided April 29, 2026). An assistant supervisor at the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, working fully remote as a disability accommodation, was refused an extension in December 2023 and offered two telework days a week with intermittent family leave for the other three. The Commission said it has no primary jurisdiction over an ADA accommodation request but can apply the ADA in a discrimination appeal. It found the record did not settle whether full-time remote work would be an undue burden and sent the case back to the department for a new determination within 60 days. Along the way it said the three-day in-office requirement "does not prohibit" full-time remote work as an accommodation where the employee can do the essential duties remotely without undue burden.
J.S. (Docket 2025-2617, decided December 17, 2025). A research analyst at the Department of Community Affairs asked to work fully remote as an accommodation and was given a private office instead. He objected to the department's stated reasons, saying collaboration mostly happened remotely. The Commission found the investigation adequate and noted that, by his own account, his complaint was "not with the accommodation itself." The appeal was denied.
R.M. (Dockets 2025-223 and 2025-907, decided January 21, 2026). A Department of Health employee said her request to telework two days a week was denied in retaliation for a workplace violence complaint. Her supervisor said she was new to the unit and needed in-office training. The Commission accepted the investigation's finding that holding a new employee back from telework until she could work independently was a legitimate business decision, and denied the appeals.
Data and methodology
Every date, docket number and quotation in this article was read on October 20, 2026 from the Commission's published copies of the September 2, 2020 emergency notice, the May 5, 2025 notice of proposal, the November 3, 2025 notice of adoption and the three decisions linked above, and from the October 1, 2023 memorandum of understanding as posted by CWA District 1. The pilot orders of April 6, 2022, July 20, 2022, June 7, 2023 and May 22, 2024 are described as the proposal and the memorandum describe them; we did not read the orders themselves. Rule citations link to the full text of Title 4A and Title 11A as reproduced on this site.
The last section reports the three telework decisions we identified while writing. A decision we did not identify would change the last section, and the absence of a 4A:6-7.8 grievance decision is a statement about what was published as of that date, not about what has been filed. We do not describe any department's telework plan.
This is general information about the public record, not legal advice. If you think we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.