California meal and rest break law: the 5th-hour rule, the 10-minute rest and what a missed break costs

The short answer

California is the strictest state in the country on breaks, and the one where a missed break costs real money. For a non-exempt employee the rules are:

• Meal period: 30 minutes, unpaid and off duty, once a shift is longer than 5 hours, and it must start before the end of the fifth hour of work. A second 30 minute meal period is due once the shift passes 10 hours, starting before the end of the tenth hour.
• Rest period: 10 minutes, paid, for every 4 hours worked "or major fraction thereof". In practice that means one rest break for a shift of 3.5 to 6 hours, two for a shift over 6 hours up to 10, three over 10 hours.
• Premium: one extra hour of pay, at the regular rate, for each workday a meal period is missed, late or cut short, and another hour for each workday a rest period is missed. Two hours a day maximum, one per type.

The sources are Labor Code sections 512 and 226.7 and the Industrial Welfare Commission wage orders, all on dir.ca.gov. Everything below is about turning them into a schedule that holds.

Meal periods: the fifth hour is the trap

The 5 hour trigger is not "a shift of 5 hours or more", it is any shift longer than 5 hours. A shift of 5 hours and 10 minutes needs a meal period. And the timing rule is where most violations come from: the break must begin before the employee has completed 5 hours of work. Someone who clocks in at 9:00 must be on their meal break by 13:59 at the latest, not at 14:00.

Two waivers exist, and both must be by mutual consent, ideally in writing:

• If the whole shift is 6 hours or less, the first meal period can be waived.
• If the whole shift is 12 hours or less, the second meal period can be waived, but only if the first one was taken.

A meal period counts only if the employee is relieved of all duty, free to leave the premises, and not interrupted. An employee eating at the register while answering the odd question has not had a meal period, whatever the schedule says. The employer's obligation, since the California Supreme Court's Brinker decision in 2012, is to provide the break and not impede it, not to force the employee to take it. But if your records show the break was late, short or missing, the presumption runs against you.

Meal periods must be recorded: start and end time, every day. Rest periods do not have to be recorded. That difference matters when you set up the time clock.

Rest periods: ten minutes, paid, in the middle

The rest break is paid, so nobody clocks out for it, and it should fall in the middle of each work period "insofar as practicable". A common way to schedule it: one rest break roughly two hours into a 4 hour block. The employee must be relieved of all duty for those ten minutes and free to leave the work area; an on-call rest break, where the person has to stay reachable, is not a rest break (Augustus v. ABM, 2016).

Hours worked in the shift	Rest periods due
Less than 3.5	0
3.5 to 6	1
More than 6, up to 10	2
More than 10, up to 14	3

What a missed break costs

Section 226.7 sets the premium: one hour of pay at the employee's regular rate for each workday a compliant meal period was not provided, and one hour for each workday a compliant rest period was not provided. The regular rate is not the base hourly rate: since Ferra v. Loews (2021) it includes non-discretionary bonuses and commissions, the same rate you use for overtime.

For a store with eight employees where the meal break routinely starts twenty minutes late, that is up to eight extra hours of pay a day. It adds up faster than any other scheduling mistake in the state, and it is the most common claim in California wage-and-hour litigation.

The other California rules that shape a schedule

Breaks are one part. Four more rules decide what a California rota can look like:

Daily overtime (Labor Code 510). Time and a half after 8 hours in a day, double time after 12. On the seventh consecutive day of a workweek: time and a half for the first 8 hours, double time beyond. The federal 40 hour week still applies on top. A four-day week of 10 hour shifts means 2 hours of daily overtime every day unless you have a valid alternative workweek schedule adopted by employee election.

Reporting time pay. An employee who reports for a scheduled shift and is sent home, or given less than half of it, is owed half the scheduled hours, with a floor of 2 hours and a ceiling of 4, at the regular rate. Cutting a slow Tuesday short is not free.

Split shift premium. A split shift (two work periods in the day separated by more than a meal break) earns one extra hour at the state minimum wage, unless the employee's wages for the day already exceed minimum wage by at least that amount.

Local predictive scheduling. San Francisco's Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinances and Los Angeles' Fair Work Week ordinance (retail, since April 2023) require large retail employers to post schedules 14 days ahead and pay premiums for changes. If you have stores in those cities, the general picture is in fair workweek laws.

Building a California schedule that holds

Three habits cover almost all of it:

1. Write the meal period into the shift with a start time, placed before the fifth hour. A 9:00 to 17:30 shift becomes 9:00 to 13:30, meal 13:30 to 14:00, 14:00 to 17:30. If the shift is 6 hours or less and the employee signs a waiver, note the waiver on the shift.
2. Make people clock out and in for the meal period. It is the only record that proves the break was taken, on time, in full. Rest breaks stay on the clock.
3. Let the schedule flag the thresholds before publishing: shifts over 5 hours without a meal break, meal breaks starting after the fifth hour, shifts over 10 hours without a second one, days over 8 hours, seventh consecutive days. Finding them in payroll two weeks later is when the premium is already owed.

Squadra's schedule shows the break inside each shift, the time clock records meal periods as clock-out and clock-in, and the weekly view shows daily hours per person so an 8 hour day stands out before it becomes a 9 hour one. Free up to 10 employees: see the pricing.

For the federal floor and the other states: break laws in the US. For the overtime side, the overtime calculator applies the 40 hour weekly rule; California's daily thresholds sit on top of it.