UK rest breaks: what the law requires, and how to build it into your schedule

The short answer

Under the Working Time Regulations, a worker in the UK gets one uninterrupted 20 minute break once they work more than 6 hours in a day, 11 hours of rest between working days, and either 24 uninterrupted hours off each week or 48 hours each fortnight. The break does not have to be paid: that depends on the employment contract.

Those figures come from the government guidance at gov.uk. Everything below is about applying them to an actual schedule without a spreadsheet full of errors.

What the four rules actually mean

The 20 minute break. The trigger is working more than 6 hours in the day. Not 6 hours exactly, more than 6. It must be uninterrupted, taken during the day rather than at the start or the end, and the worker must be free to leave their workstation.

Eleven hours between shifts. If someone finishes at 8pm, they cannot start before 7am. This is the rule that quietly breaks in hospitality, where a late close followed by an early open is common.

Weekly rest. Either 24 uninterrupted hours off every week, or 48 hours every two weeks. Averaging is allowed over the fortnight, which gives you room to build a schedule that alternates.

Payment. The 20 minutes is not automatically paid. Read the contract. Many employers pay it anyway, and if you do, be consistent, because inconsistency is what creates disputes.

Break entitlement by shift length

The law sets one trigger, not a sliding scale. Whether the shift is 7, 9 or 12 hours, the statutory minimum for an adult is the same 20 minutes. Anything longer comes from the contract or a sector agreement, not from the regulations.

Shift length	Adult worker (18 and over)	Young worker (under 18)
Up to 4 hours 30	No break required	No break required
More than 4 hours 30, up to 6 hours	No break required	30 minutes
More than 6 hours (7, 8 or 9 hours)	20 minutes, uninterrupted	30 minutes
10 or 12 hours	20 minutes is still the legal minimum	Check the separate gov.uk rules on hours for young workers

Young workers also get 12 hours of rest between working days and 48 hours off each week, against 11 and 24 for adults. All of these figures come from the gov.uk guidance on rest breaks at work.

Is break time counted as working hours?

This is the question people search for most, and the answer decides your payroll.

An unpaid rest break is not working time. If someone is rostered 9am to 5pm with a 30 minute unpaid break, they are paid for 7 hours 30, not 8. If the break is paid under the contract, it counts. Those 30 minutes a day are also the difference between two very different wage bills once employer National Insurance and pension come on top: the UK employee cost calculator shows what an hour actually costs you.

The complication is the break that is not really a break. Someone eating a sandwich behind the counter while keeping an eye on the shop is not free to leave their workstation, so that is not a rest break in the legal sense, whatever the schedule says. If your team routinely works through, the honest fix is to change the schedule, not the paperwork.

Where rotas go wrong in practice

Three failures account for most of it, and none of them are bad intent.

The 6 hour boundary. A 6 hour shift needs no break, a 6 hour 15 shift does. Extend someone by fifteen minutes to cover a rush and the rule flips without anyone noticing.

The close then open. A member of staff closes on Friday, opens on Saturday. On paper it looks like a normal schedule. In hours it can be 9 hours of rest, not 11.

The break that was never taken. It is written on the schedule, so payroll deducts it. Nobody actually took it. That is both a compliance problem and an underpayment problem, and it usually surfaces months later.

Building it into the schedule instead of checking afterwards

The reliable approach is to make the schedule itself carry the rule, so the question never has to be asked at the end of the month.

1. Decide your break policy per shift length and write it down once. Under 6 hours, none required. Over 6 hours, 20 minutes minimum.
2. Make the break visible on the schedule, not implied. If it is not written, it will not be taken, and it will still be deducted.
3. Check the gap between the end of one shift and the start of the next when you build the week, not when payroll runs.
4. Keep a record of hours actually worked, not just hours planned. When someone disputes a payslip, the planned schedule proves nothing on its own. The hours bank calculator gives you a balance in thirty seconds.

Where a tool helps and where it does not

Software will not decide your policy for you, and any tool claiming to guarantee compliance is overselling. What it does well is arithmetic and memory: totalling hours with breaks deducted correctly, showing the gap between consecutive shifts, and keeping a record of what was actually worked.

Squadra Planning handles the schedule and the hours, shares the week through a link with nothing to install, and records real hours if you turn on clocking in. The rules above still need a human decision. The tool just stops the arithmetic going wrong. Prefer a file? The free rota templates for Excel and Google Sheets add up the week with breaks deducted; the online rota planner flags the 11 hours and the missing break as you type. Annual leave alongside the rota: the holiday entitlement calculator. The other limits the same regulations set, from the 48-hour average to night work and under-18s: the Working Time Regulations and your rota.

Scheduling in the United States as well? The numbers do not carry over: there is no federal requirement to give a break at all, and the rule that bites is which breaks you must pay for. See US break laws.

*Source: gov.uk guidance on rest breaks at work. This article is general information, not legal advice: check your own contracts and any sector agreement that applies.*