Which Breaks Have to Be Paid?

Federal law requires no breaks at all

This surprises people. The FLSA does not require employers to provide meal periods or rest breaks. What it does is govern how breaks are treated when they are provided.

Many states do require breaks — California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and others have meal and rest requirements, often with a penalty payment when one is missed. So the practical answer depends on your state, while the payment rules below are federal and apply everywhere.

Short breaks are paid

Rest breaks of roughly 5 to 20 minutes are counted as hours worked and must be paid. The reasoning is that short breaks primarily benefit the employer through improved performance, and they are too brief to be used for anything else.

Consequences worth knowing:

A paid 15-minute break should not be deducted from your total.
Taking longer than permitted does not automatically make the whole break unpaid — though the employer may discipline you, and clearly communicated limits can make the excess unpaid.
Smoke breaks, coffee breaks and stepping outside for air fall in the same category if they are short.

Meal periods are unpaid — if they are genuine

A bona fide meal period, ordinarily 30 minutes or more, need not be paid. The condition is the important part: you must be completely relieved of duty.

You are not relieved of duty if you are:

Eating at your desk while answering the phone.
Required to stay on the premises to cover the floor.
Watching equipment, minding a till, or expected to respond if something happens.
Interrupted repeatedly, so the break is not usable.

If any of these apply, the time is work and must be paid — even if it is labelled a lunch break and deducted automatically. A working lunch is not an unpaid meal period; it is unpaid work.

Being required to remain on the premises does not by itself always defeat the meal period, but being required to remain available does. The test is whether the time is yours.

Automatic deductions

Many timekeeping systems deduct 30 minutes from every shift over a certain length, whether or not a break was taken. This is lawful only if the deduction reflects reality — and there must be a way to correct it when it does not.

Automatic deduction is one of the most common sources of unpaid time, precisely because it is invisible. The shift looks complete on the timesheet and the half hour has already gone. If you regularly work through lunch in a job with an automatic deduction, that is worth checking carefully.

How this affects overtime

Unpaid meal periods are not hours worked, so they do not count toward the 40-hour threshold. Paid rest breaks are hours worked, and do.

This has a sharp edge. Thirty minutes of wrongly unpaid lunch each day is 2½ hours a week. For someone already at 40 hours, that is not merely 2½ hours of missing pay — it is 2½ hours of overtime, at time and a half. Small unpaid increments become expensive once the week is full.

Entering breaks in the calculator

The timesheet calculator asks for unpaid break minutes per day, and subtracts only those. So:

Enter genuine meal periods where you were fully relieved of duty.
Do not enter short paid rest breaks — they are already part of your paid time.
Do not enter a lunch you worked through, even if your employer deducted it. Enter it as zero and you will see what you should have been paid; the difference is what to ask about.

Which breaks have to be paid?