Employers: A Guide to Hiring Temporary Workers

Hiring temporary employees is one of the most common ways Maine businesses handle a busy season, a sudden vacancy, or a project that has an end date. It is also one of the easiest places to pick up a compliance problem without realizing it. The rules that apply to your full-time staff mostly apply to your temporary staff too, and a few Maine-specific rules apply in ways that surprise people. Let's take a look at some best practices when it comes to hiring temporary workers.

Key Takeaways from this Article

• A temporary employee is almost always a W-2 employee, not a 1099 contractor, and calling them temporary does not change that.
• Maine uses one standardized test to decide whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, and it covers workers' compensation, unemployment, and wage and hour law at the same time.
• Maine requires workers' compensation coverage starting with your first employee, with no exception for seasonal, part-time, or short-term workers.
• Temporary and seasonal staff count toward the headcount thresholds for Maine's Earned Paid Leave and Paid Family and Medical Leave programs.
• Noncompete agreements are effectively off the table for most temporary workers in Maine, though confidentiality agreements are still available to you.

What is Considered a Temporary Employee?

A temporary employee is a worker you hire for a set period of time or for a specific project, rather than on an ongoing basis. The category includes seasonal staff, interns, workers placed with you by a staffing agency, and people brought in to cover a leave of absence. In most cases, a temporary worker is a W-2 employee of either your business or the staffing agency.

That last point trips up a lot of owners. There is no such thing as a "temporary" classification under federal or Maine law. A worker is either an employee or an independent contractor, and the length of the assignment has almost nothing to do with which one they are. A dishwasher you hire for twelve weeks in July is an employee. A freelance web developer who builds your site over twelve weeks, works from her own office, sets her own hours, and has four other clients is probably a contractor. The duration is the same. The relationship is not.

Interns are their own case, and we cover them below.

What Types of Companies Are Hiring Temporary Workers?

Just about every industry in Maine uses temporary help at some point, but a few lean on it heavily. Seasonality is the biggest driver, and Maine has more of it than most states.

• Hospitality and tourism, including inns, restaurants, and campgrounds that staff up from Memorial Day through Columbus Day
• Landscaping, excavation, and construction crews that add people for the spring and summer build season
• Retail, especially outlet and gift shops in coastal towns
• Accounting and tax preparation firms that bring on seasonal preparers from January through April
• Warehouses, food processing, and manufacturing operations covering a production push
• Professional services offices filling in for a parental leave or an extended medical absence
• Agriculture and aquaculture, including harvest crews

If you run an inn in Kennebunkport, your payroll might go from six people in March to twenty-two in July. If you run a landscaping company in Topsham, you might add a full crew in April and let them go in November. Both of those are normal. Both of them also create a payroll and compliance workload that a business with a steady headcount never deals with.

What Should Employers Know About Hiring Temporary Workers?

The short version: the temporary label does not create an exemption from anything. Below are the areas where we see Maine businesses get caught most often.

Classify the Worker Correctly

Maine uses one standardized employment definition covering workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, and wage and hour law at once. Anyone performing services for pay is presumed to be an employee. To treat someone as a contractor, you have to show they are free from your essential direction and control and that they meet all five criteria in the first part of the test plus three of the seven in the second. If you tell them when to show up, hand them your equipment, and they work only for you, you will not clear that bar no matter what the contract says. Misclassification penalties are high.

Workers' Compensation Applies From Your First Employee

Maine requires nearly every private employer to carry coverage as soon as it has one employee. No headcount threshold, no part-time exception, no seasonal exception. A high school student you bring on for three weeks in August to help with inventory needs to be covered. The exemptions are narrow, covering certain agricultural and aquacultural operations, domestic workers in a private home, and owners who do not elect coverage for themselves.

If workers come through a staffing agency, the agency is usually the employer of record and carries the coverage. Do not assume it. Ask for a current certificate of insurance before anyone starts. 

The Wage and Hour Rules Do Not Change

Maine's minimum wage is $15.10 per hour in 2026, with a service employee tip wage of $7.55 that tips must bring up to the full minimum each workweek. Portland and Rockland set higher local rates. Overtime is still one and a half times the regular rate after 40 hours in a workweek, and temporary status has no bearing on it.

Picture a seasonal server in Old Orchard Beach during the second week of July. She works 51 hours, and she is owed overtime on those 11 extra hours exactly the way a year-round server would be. If seasonal staff work two roles at two rates, the math gets more involved as they must be paid using the blended overtime rate.

Safety Responsibility is Shared, Not Transferred

When you use a staffing agency, OSHA generally treats the agency and your business as joint employers of that worker. The agency handles general safety training before placement. You handle everything specific to your site, meaning the actual hazards, the actual equipment, and the actual procedures in your building.

One detail catches host employers off guard. If a temporary worker is injured at your worksite and the injury is recordable, it generally goes on your OSHA log rather than the agency's, because you are the one supervising the work day to day. Spell out who does what in the staffing agreement before the first placement.

Confidentiality Agreements Work; Noncompetes Usually Will Not

Under Maine law, you may not require or permit an employee earning at or below 400 percent of the federal poverty level to sign a noncompete. That threshold sits somewhere in the low sixty thousands for an individual, which rules out most temporary and seasonal workers immediately. Even above that line, a noncompete does not take effect until the later of one year of employment or six months from signing, so a summer hire will be gone before either clock runs out. Violations carry a fine of not less than $5,000.

Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements are still available to you, and they address the actual risk anyway. If a temporary bookkeeper will see your client list, your pricing, and your payroll data, an NDA is the useful document. Have a Maine employment attorney review whatever you use, since restrictive covenant law here has changed several times in the last few years.

Interns Are Not Free Labor

If your business is for profit, an unpaid internship is only lawful when the intern, not your company, is the primary beneficiary. The Department of Labor applies a seven factor test, weighing whether the training resembles what an educational program would provide, whether the internship is tied to coursework or academic credit, and whether the intern's work complements rather than displaces paid employees. No single factor decides it.

The practical version: if your summer intern spends August running the social media calendar because the person who normally does it is out, she is doing an employee's job and belongs on payroll at at least minimum wage. Shadowing your marketing manager and building a portfolio project for credit looks much more like a real internship. When in doubt, pay the intern. It costs less than a wage claim.

Temporary Staff Count Toward Maine's Leave Thresholds

Maine's Earned Paid Leave law applies to employers with more than 10 employees for more than 120 days in a calendar year, outside of designated seasonal industries. Your seasonal workers count toward that threshold and accrue leave themselves. Paid Family and Medical Leave matters more to your budget. Your premium rate depends on employer size measured each October 1, and 15 or more covered employees on the payroll in 20 or more calendar workweeks puts you at 1 percent of wages instead of 0.5 percent. Maine's guidance is explicit that temporary and intermittent employees are included in that count.

So a Brunswick business with 12 year-round employees that adds 5 seasonal workers from April through October sits at 17 for roughly 30 weeks, crosses the 20-week mark, and moves into the 1 percent tier for the following year. The same five hires over a 12-week summer likely would not. Know where your headcount lands before October 1 so a rate change does not surprise you in January.

The Onboarding Paperwork is the Same

Short assignments do not shorten the paperwork. Every temporary employee you hire directly still needs a Form I-9 with documents examined within three business days of the start date, a federal Form W-4 and a Maine Form W-4ME, current labor law posters, and PFML notice at the time of hire. You also have to report the hire to the state within seven days, which applies to anyone who receives a W-2, including someone who works one day and quits before the report is due. Penalties reach $200 per month per violation.

How Can Paper Trails Help?

Temporary and seasonal hiring is not a problem to be avoided. For a lot of Maine businesses it is simply how the year works, and done well it gives you flexibility that a fixed headcount never will. The trouble comes from treating temporary workers as a lighter version of employees, when the law mostly treats them as employees who happen to be leaving sooner.

Our team works with Maine employers on exactly these questions every spring and fall. That means classification reviews before someone starts, onboarding and new hire reporting handled inside one system, overtime and leave accrual calculated correctly for staff who come and go, and a real person to call when something unusual comes up. If you want a set of eyes on your hiring practices, employee handbook, or classification decisions, our HR consulting services are built for that.

Written: September 2026

Written by: Danielle Nemeth