Which laws change what your schedule may look like
Most legal writing about work tells you what the law says. A planner needs something narrower and more useful: which rules constrain the shape of a shift, and what each one becomes once it reaches a roster. Describe a shift below and see the rules that reach it, separated into binding law, official guidance and the places where a requirement has been looked for and does not exist.
94 rules · 6 jurisdictions · 57 primary sources · every rule read on 6 August 2026
What is in here, and what is deliberately not
One test decides whether a rule belongs in this registry: does it change what a schedule is allowed to look like. Break entitlements pass, because they put an unavailable window inside a shift. Hours ceilings and overtime triggers pass, one as a wall and one as a price. Rest between shifts passes, because it constrains what tomorrow can start at. So do night work limits, the separate and stricter rules for workers under 18, heat and outdoor triggers, and advance notice requirements.
Discrimination law, wage theft, payroll mechanics and contract law are out, and they are out on purpose. They matter enormously to an employer and none of them changes the shape of a roster. Admitting them would turn a reference a planner can act on into a thin encyclopedia of employment law, which is already written and already better elsewhere.
Each of the 94 rules carries the government source it was read from and the date it was read. The sourcing rules, the staleness window that fails the build, and the reason 9 entries record an absence rather than a requirement are set out in the methodology. Heat is the one topic where all four countries moved recently and in different directions, so heat and outdoor work is covered across jurisdictions on one page rather than repeated on four.
Three answers, not one
73 of the rules here are binding, 12 are official guidance, and 9 record a checked absence. Blurring those together is the most damaging thing a compliance reference can do, because a reader either over-complies with something advisory or dismisses the whole page once they discover one stated requirement was never binding. The three labels are kept visually apart everywhere they appear, including inside the checker.
The third label is worth dwelling on. There is no federal break entitlement in the United States, no adult break statute in Florida, and no maximum working temperature anywhere in the United Kingdom. Those are among the most valuable answers in the registry, and they are findings rather than gaps. A checked absence tells you that you are free to schedule, not that nobody looked.
Check a shift against a jurisdiction
Nothing is sent anywhere. The registry ships with the page and the matching runs in your browser, so the answer is the same one the jurisdiction pages give. The address bar updates as you go, which makes a configuration shareable with whoever has to sign off on the roster.
The jurisdictions in the registry
Four countries, and inside the United States a federal layer plus the two states published so far. Each page carries the rules in full, with the exact citation, the government source and the date that source was read.
United States (federal)
U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division (Fair Labor Standards Act); Occupational Safety and Health…
Almost every U.S. scheduling constraint employers believe is federal is actually state law.
California
California Department of Industrial Relations (wage and hour rules enforced by the Division of Labor Standards…
California is famous as the most protective wage-and-hour state in the country, yet it sets no maximum daily hours for adults and no general minimum rest between shifts.
Florida
Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (Fla. Stat. 450.012(4) defines 'department' as DBPR…
Most states with no break law simply never passed one.
Japan
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省), Labour Standards Bureau, enforced locally by Prefectural Labour Bureaus…
In most countries the overtime ceiling is one number you compare a timesheet against.
Singapore
Ministry of Manpower (MOM)
Singapore has two working-time systems running on opposite logic, and employers routinely apply the wrong one.
United Kingdom
Split enforcement, no single agency. HSE (with local authorities, CAA, DVSA, ORR and ONR in their sectors) enforces…
The UK kept the EU's 48-hour week but attached an escape hatch nobody else in Europe has: any adult worker can sign it away individually, and the employer only has to keep a list of who opted out.
Why there is no league table
The obvious thing to build from six jurisdictions is a grid: one row each, a column headed maximum weekly hours, another headed break minutes, and a reader who can see at a glance which country is strictest. That grid would be wrong in a way that is very hard to see, because the numbers in it are not the same quantity. A hard ceiling, an average a worker can individually opt out of, and a pay threshold with no ceiling behind it all render as two digits.
A reconciliation pass across the registry produced 24 reasons two figures cannot be lined up. The ones that reach most of the registry are below, and the rest travel with the individual rules they bear on, both on the jurisdiction pages and inside the checker.
From a rule to a constraint
Every rule in this registry carries a line describing what it becomes inside a schedule, because that is the translation nobody else does. A break entitlement is not a policy sentence, it is an unavailable window that has to sit at a particular point in a shift and be covered by somebody else. A rest period between shifts is a lower bound on the gap between two assignments for the same person. A heat trigger is a rotation interval that shortens when a measurement crosses a threshold, which means the roster has to be re-solved during the day rather than the night before.
Written that way the rules stop being reading material and start being solver input, which is exactly how they behave in intrashift scheduling, where break placement, rotation intervals and certification cover are worked out together rather than one at a time. Guidance is the interesting case: it does not belong in the hard constraint set, because a solver that treats an inspection priority as infeasible will refuse to produce a schedule that is perfectly lawful. It belongs in the objective, as a cost the plan pays for ignoring.
The checker above stops at the statute. It cannot see your collective agreement, your certifications, who called in this morning, or the fact that one position closes when it rains. Those are the constraints that make a real roster hard, and they are why hand-built grids fail somewhere around the third exception of the day.
Questions
- Is there a federal meal or rest break law in the United States?
- No. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets no meal break and no rest break entitlement for adults, and it sets no ceiling on hours in a day either. What federal law does say is narrower: where an employer chooses to offer a short break of roughly twenty minutes or less, that break counts as hours worked and must be paid. Break entitlement itself is state law, which is why a United States answer is not an answer until you pick a state.
- Why does the checker refuse to answer a heat rule when I leave the temperature blank?
- Because an unmeasured temperature is not a temperature below the threshold. If nobody put a thermometer out, the honest answer is that we do not know whether the trigger was crossed, not that the rule does not apply. Rules with a temperature trigger therefore stay in the did-not-fire list with their threshold shown, and they move into the results as soon as you enter a reading.
- What is the difference between binding law and official guidance here?
- Binding law is an obligation a schedule can be unlawful for breaking, including obligations that work as a price such as an overtime multiplier. Official guidance is something a government body genuinely published, such as an enforcement programme, an inspection priority, a ministerial notice outside the penal provisions, or a rule that has not yet taken effect. Guidance is a real risk signal and it is not a hard feasibility constraint, so the two are never shown with the same treatment. Of the 94 rules here, 73 are binding, 12 are guidance and 9 record a checked absence.
- Can I compare maximum weekly hours across these countries?
- Not in a single column, and the engine will not build you one. Singapore's 44 is a hard ceiling that reaches only Part 4 employees. The United Kingdom's 48 is a seventeen week rolling average any adult worker can sign away individually. Japan's 40 is a baseline that a filed Article 36 agreement routinely lifts. The United States federal 40 and California 40 are pay thresholds with no ceiling behind them at all. Lined up as one number, the highest figure in the column would belong to the weakest rule.
- Does the checker know about our collective agreement?
- No, and it says so rather than guessing. A collective agreement layers on top of statute and never below it, so where the contract is more generous the contract governs the schedule. Ticking the unionized box adds a note naming the clauses that usually bite hardest on rotation, including seniority and bidding rights, minimum call-in pay, notice periods for schedule changes and guaranteed break placement. None of that can be derived from the law, so the agreement itself has to be read.
- What counts as a scheduling law, and what has been left out?
- A rule is in the registry when it changes what a schedule may look like: break entitlements, hours ceilings and overtime triggers, rest between shifts, night work limits, rules for workers under 18, heat and outdoor triggers, and advance notice requirements. Discrimination law, wage theft, payroll mechanics and contract law are out by design. They matter to employers, they do not change the shape of a roster, and including them would turn a scheduling reference into a thin employment law encyclopedia.
- How current are these figures?
- Every rule carries the primary source it came from and the date that source was last read, and every one of the 94 rules here was last read on 6 August 2026. A test fails the build when any rule drifts past twelve months without re-verification, so a stale figure breaks the site rather than reaching a reader. Sources are statute text and government agency pages only.
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