Break policies decide whether the time an employee spends on break counts as paid hours. The choice flows into the schedule grid's hours total, the labor-cost dashboard, and any payroll integration.
Why this exists
Different industries — and different state laws — treat breaks differently:
- Restaurants / retail (most US states) — typical 30-minute lunch break is unpaid. Schedule a 9–5 shift with a 30-min break; the employee is paid for 7.5 hours.
- California — by law, certain breaks must be paid. State-specific compliance matters.
- Salaried roles — breaks are usually paid because pay isn't hour-tied.
The four policy types
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Deduct breaks (default) | Break minutes are subtracted from paid hours. 8h shift, 30min break = 7.5 paid hours. |
| Paid breaks | Break minutes count as paid time. 8h shift, 30min break = 8 paid hours. |
| First N min paid (coming soon) | Up to N minutes per shift are paid; anything beyond is deducted. Common compromise. |
| California standard (coming soon) | First 10 min of each rest break paid, meal breaks deducted unless missed. |
Today, Deduct breaks and Paid breaks are wired through to payroll. The other two are scaffolded — you can configure them in the UI, but they fall back to "Deduct breaks" behavior under the hood.
Where policies live
- Org library — every policy you define lives at the org level (Settings → Break Policies). Reuse across locations.
- Location assignment — each location picks one policy from the library. Switching it changes the behavior for that location's schedules going forward.
- One default — the first policy you create (or the seeded "Deduct breaks") is marked as the org default. New locations inherit it unless you set otherwise.
Setting up
When you sign up, Timely seeds a default policy named "Default (deduct breaks)" and assigns it to your first location. You don't have to do anything to get going.
If you want to add a different policy:
- Settings → Break Policies → "Add policy"
- Pick a type, name it, configure (e.g., for "First N min paid", set N).
- Save.
- Settings → Locations → click the location you want to use it → change the policy dropdown.
Practical impact in the grid
When you assign a 9 AM – 5 PM shift with a 30-minute break:
- Under Deduct breaks: the right-column hours total shows 7.5h.
- Under Paid breaks: the same shift shows 8h.
The schedule rules engine evaluates against paid hours, so a "max 40h/week" rule treats a 5×8h week with deduct-breaks as 37.5h (under the limit) — even though the employee is on-site for 40 hours.
Per-employee overrides
Not yet — the policy applies uniformly within a location. If you have a mix of salaried (paid breaks) and hourly (deduct breaks) employees at one location, the recommended pattern is to keep them at the location level: assign the location the most-common policy, and handle the salary edge case in payroll. Per-employee overrides are on the roadmap.