Many states require employers to provide employees with unpaid meal breaks and impose strict penalties when those requirements aren't met. California, for example, entitles employees to a 30-minute unpaid break when they work 5 or more hours. If an employee is compelled to clock back in early for any reason, the break becomes paid and the employer owes an additional hour of pay at the employee's regular rate of pay. If an employee would rather waive their break voluntarily, they may do so with no penalty to the employer.

Keeping track of this manually is difficult and has exposed many employers to significant legal liability — particularly since most systems don't properly calculate regular rate of pay. Workforce handles the compliance logic automatically. This article walks you through the configuration.

Navigate to Settings → Breaks and check the two checkboxes at the top for Enable break rules and Require staff to nominate which break they are taking. The latter will require employees to select the specific break that they're clocking in for, which might be new for some users.

Then set up as many mandated meal breaks as you need. Just be sure to check the checkbox.

If you are not using the timeclock app and need employees to clock in using their mobile app, navigate to Settings → Timesheets and enable Remote Clock-Ins. This is required for the system to ensure compliance.

Navigate to Settings → Shift Questions.

You have a few options of how to approach compliance here. We have two types of shift questions you can ask your employees. "Meal Break Acknowledgement" and "Meal Break Question".

Meal Break Question will ask your employee a yes or no question about whether they waived their break. If they select "No" then the break will become paid and they will be awarded 1 extra hour of pay at their regular rate of pay. If they select "Yes" then the break is unpaid and no penalty is assumed by the employer.

Meal Break Acknowledgement will simply ask them to acknowledge that they are returning to work too early, and then the break will become paid and they will be awarded 1 extra hour of pay at their regular rate of pay. This option is for employers who want to play it extra safe; however it might lead to extra losses for the employer. We recommend option 1, the Meal Break Question.

Setting up the question for compliance would look something like this.

This will handle cases where employees don't take their full break. For also handling the scenario where they don't take their break at all, set up a second question that looks something like this:

This will compel employees to think carefully about taking their full break and create a paper trail record of employees' answers, weakening an employee's ability to fraudulently claim violations of labor law against their employer.