The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Groff decision eliminated the de minimus test for religious accommodation requests under Title VII, and replaced it with one that requires employers to grant the requests absent undue hardship. The use of the term undue hardship understandably led employers to assume that they should treat religious accommodation requests similarly to the way they handle those for medical conditions under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (which includes North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia) concluded that despite Groff, Title VII imposes a lesser burden on employers to provide accommodations as compared to the ADA. Hall v. Sheppard Pratt Health System Inc. involved one of a seemingly never-ending series of challenges to employer vaccination requirements imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The plaintiff was an intake administrator for an eating disorders clinic who requested a religious exemption from her employer’s vaccine mandate. Her request was declined and she sued, claiming that the employer allowed employees who requested medical exemptions from the mandate to continue working with masks and periodic testing.

The Fourth Circuit concluded that the employer was entitled to apply different undue hardship standards to religious accommodation requests as compared to those used for medical ones. The court noted that under Groff, employers can consider non-economic costs imposed by accommodation requests, and do not have to meet the ADA’s requirement that they demonstrate a significant difficulty or expense in order to deny the request. In this case, unvaccinated employees presented clear hazards to a vulnerable patient population, and justified the different accommodations given to employees who demonstrated a medical disability.

While Groff ended employers' ability to reject religious accommodation requests based on minor nuisances, this decision makes clear that companies are not required to demonstrate significant costs in order to deny them. Additional court decisions may further clarify where to draw the line between required accommodations and undue hardships. However, employers do not have to agree to a religious accommodation request merely because they provided the same job modifications to a disabled employee.

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