How this reference was built

What counts as a scheduling rule

One test decides whether a rule enters the registry: does it change what a schedule is allowed to look like? A rule that forbids a shape, forces a break into a roster, caps a run of days, sets a clock window or puts a price on an hour is in. A rule that matters enormously to an employee and nothing at all to a roster is out, however serious it is.

That leaves 7 topics, and the manifest fixes what each of them means so a rule cannot be filed by instinct.

Rest and meal breaks

Non-working intervals INSIDE a shift: meal periods, rest periods, cool-down rests with a fixed cadence, and the pay classification of a break the employer chose to give.

Hours and overtime limits

How much may be worked: daily and weekly ceilings, overtime thresholds and multipliers, averaging and reference periods, work-period alternatives, and schedule-shape pricing rules (reporting time pay, split shift premium).

Rest between shifts

Rest OUTSIDE the shift. Covers both daily turnaround (the gap between one shift ending and the next starting) and weekly rest days or day-of-rest guarantees. The canonical list has no separate weekly-rest value, so weekly rest lives here.

Night work

Rules about working at night that apply to the general adult workforce: night hours limits, night premiums, night-worker health assessments, fatigue guidance.

Heat and outdoor work

Heat exposure rules. Despite the name it also carries INDOOR heat rules, because the canonical list has no heat-indoor value. See caveat heat-indoor-filed-under-outdoor.

Workers under 18

Any rule whose covered population is restricted to workers under 18, WHATEVER its subject matter. A minors' night curfew is topic 'minors' with secondaryTopics ['night-work'], not topic 'night-work'.

Predictive scheduling

Advance notice of the roster, predictability pay, right to decline changes, access to hours, and statutory written notice of working hours.

What is deliberately excluded

Discrimination and equal pay, wage theft and minimum wage mechanics, payroll and tax, contracts and dismissal, immigration and right to work, and the wider body of health and safety law beyond heat exposure. None of them changes the shape of a shift, so none of them belongs in a tool whose output is a constraint a planner can encode. The wider reason is sharper than scope discipline: an employment law encyclopedia written by a scheduling company would be shallow everywhere, and shallow is the one thing a compliance reference cannot be.

The filter runs in the other direction too. 42 subjects were searched for across the six jurisdictions and then deliberately not published, each with its reason recorded beside it. Japan's heatstroke reference tables were left out because turning an advisory work-rest ratio into a rule would have dressed a guideline up as a schedulable constraint. The recurring United States fair workweek bills were left out because a bill that never passed constrains nobody's roster.

Where every figure comes from

Statute text, regulations, and the enforcing agency's own pages. No law firm summaries, no vendor guides, no news coverage, and no figure retained on the strength of a secondary summary of a document nobody could open. Every rule carries the URL it was read from and the date it was last read, and both sit on the rule itself rather than in a footnote at the bottom of a page.

The 94 rules currently cite 16 government hosts, and nothing else.

• dir.ca.gov
• driver-roudou-jikan.mhlw.go.jp
• ecfr.gov
• flsenate.gov
• govinfo.gov
• hse.gov.uk
• jsite.mhlw.go.jp
• laws.e-gov.go.jp
• leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
• legislation.gov.uk
• mhlw.go.jp
• mom.gov.sg
• osha.gov
• sso.agc.gov.sg
• tal.sg
• wagesla.lacity.gov

Sourcing rules only mean something if you record where they cost you. The United States Department of Labor blocks automated clients, so the fact sheets most scheduling content quotes could not be read and re-verified here. The federal rules cite the eCFR and govinfo instead, which is the better citation anyway: a fact sheet paraphrases a regulation, and the regulation is the text an inspector reads.

Recorded in the federal file, verbatim

dol.gov returns HTTP 403 to automated clients from this environment, so no DOL fact sheet could be re-verified. Every citation was therefore moved to, or kept on, regulation and statute text that could be read in full. No dol.gov URL is cited as a rule source.

California produced the other kind of retrieval problem. One source cited in an earlier revision returned a page successfully and simply did not contain the labour code section it was cited for, and a widely used state page reproduces a version of that section superseded more than a decade ago. Neither is visible unless somebody opens the document and reads it, which is the whole argument for a review pass that refuses to trust the first one.

Three labels, never blurred into one

Of the 94 rules, 73 are binding law, 12 are official but not binding, and 9 record a checked absence. Rendering those three the same way would be the most damaging thing this engine could do, because a reader would either over-comply out of fear or throw the whole reference away on discovering that one requirement was advisory.

Why the third label exists

Some of the most valuable answers here are that no rule exists. There is no federal meal or rest break entitlement in the United States, no adult break statute in Florida, and no maximum working temperature anywhere in United Kingdom law. Typing those as requirements would invent a constraint that is not there. Leaving them out would hide the answer most people arrived looking for. So a verified absence is carried as a result, styled as the quietest of the three rather than as a passed check, and never as a gap in the research.

The label cuts both ways

A few entries labelled guidance carry more exposure than the word suggests. Singapore's heat measures have no legislative source, which is why they cannot be called binding law, and the Ministry of Manpower calls them required measures, inspects against them and can stop work over them. Japan's heat duty is the mirror case: the duty is a criminally enforceable ordinance provision while every number attached to it comes from an interpretive circular that could be revised without the binding text changing at all. Both facts are written on the rules themselves rather than resolved quietly by promoting or demoting a label.

Researched once, then attacked

Each jurisdiction was researched from primary text, then handed to a reviewer with one instruction: refute, do not confirm. A reviewer asked to check work agrees with it. A reviewer asked to break it opens the document. Anything that could not be found in a source the reviewer could read in full was cut or downgraded rather than kept because the first pass had believed it.

That pass changed the data in two visible ways. 6 rules had their constraint type corrected, most of them entries that stated an absence while carrying a binding label, which is precisely the error that would make a planner encode a constraint nobody imposed. Another 9 rules were refiled, because population beats subject matter: a curfew that reaches only under-18s is a rule about minors that also touches night work, not a night work rule with an age condition.

What one review pass recorded, verbatim

Adversarial verification pass completed 2026-08-06. Every rule was checked against primary government sources: flsenate.gov for Florida statutes, the enrolled bill texts of CS/CS/HB 49 (ch. 2024-25) and CS/CS/HB 433 (ch. 2024-80) read directly from the Florida Senate PDFs, govinfo.gov for the official CFR, and osha.gov for OSHA jurisdiction and heat policy. Residual known gap: the Florida Administrative Code was not exhaustively swept, so a narrow facility or licensing break rule in an unswept chapter cannot be excluded from the adult no-break claim.

And another

Every rule re-checked against primary government text: eCFR versioner API snapshot of 29 CFR at 2026-08-01 (parts 541, 553, 570, 778, 785), the United States Code 2024 edition on govinfo.gov, the OSHA directive PDF for CPL 03-00-024, and the Federal Register text of the heat NPRM. No rule is retained on the strength of a secondary summary.

Then reconciled across borders

Six files verified independently will still disagree with each other. A third pass lined them up and forced one vocabulary across all of them: 7 topics with written definitions, and 42 numeric keys, so that a break length means the same thing in every file and a null never has to be guessed at. Two conventions came out of it that matter more than they sound. Null means no rule exists, while zero means a rule exists and its value is zero. And where a jurisdiction's figure could not honestly be made to line up with another's, the difference was written down instead of being smoothed away, which produced 24 caveats.

Why there is no comparison table

The obvious thing to build from six jurisdictions is a grid with a column headed maximum weekly hours. That table is the reason a reader would be right not to trust it. One cell would hold a hard ceiling, the next an average a worker may sign away individually, the next a baseline that a filed agreement routinely lifts, and the next a pay threshold with no ceiling behind it at all. Sorted by size, the strongest rule in the set would rank near the bottom.

So the editorial rule is absolute. This engine never ranks jurisdictions and never puts two of them in one numeric column. Each caveat instead travels with the figure it bears on, appearing on the jurisdiction pages wherever a number could invite a comparison it will not survive. A reader who wants to know which country is strictest is asking a question the data cannot answer honestly, and the most useful thing a reference can do is say so.

What we are still unsure about

These are the 17 findings the reviewer was still uneasy about at the end of the work. They are published here in full rather than filed somewhere internal, because a compliance reference that lists only its confident answers is telling you less than it knows. Some are proofs of a negative that could not be swept exhaustively. Some are rules whose numbers come from a softer document than the duty behind them. Some are readings of a statute that turn on case law no government page restates.

If your roster depends on any one of these, open the primary source and read it yourself before you build against it. Each entry links to the document it came from.

1. Florida·Rest and meal breaks

   Short breaks are paid time; a meal period is unpaid only if duty-free

   Binding law

   The only surviving case of one legal source typed two ways across files (hard here, none in us-federal-rest-breaks-no-federal-entitlement). The split is defensible and now documented reciprocally in both files, but if the site renders constraintType as a badge, the same regulation will show two different badges. Consider whether the federal entry should be split into an absence rule plus a compensability rule so both files agree.

   29 CFR 785.18 (rest periods); 29 CFR 785.19 (meal periods) · GovInfo, 29 CFR 785.18 and 785.19, official Code of Federal Regulations, last read 6 August 2026

2. United States (federal)·Rest and meal breaks

   No federal break entitlement; short breaks are paid, bona fide meal periods are not

   No requirement

   Bundles a verified absence with a binding pay rule under a single constraintType. Typed 'none' by its headline claim. A consumer reading only the type will miss that the compensability half is enforceable.

   29 CFR 785.18 (Rest) and 29 CFR 785.19 (Meal) · Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR), National Archives and Records Administration, last read 6 August 2026

3. United States (federal)·Rest between shifts

   No federal minimum rest period between shifts

   No requirement

   The file's own reviewer flags it as an argument from absence: no federal instrument says 'there is no minimum rest between shifts'. The inference is sound but it is the weakest-sourced entry in the whole set.

   Inferred from 29 CFR 778.102 (no absolute limitation on hours) together with the absence of any rest-interval provision in the FLSA and 29 CFR · Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR), National Archives and Records Administration, last read 6 August 2026

4. Florida·Hours and overtime limits

   Ten hours is a legal day's work for manual labour, absent a signed written contract

   Official guidance

   An 1874 provision whose text is current and unamended since 1997 but whose modern operative force could not be verified from any primary source. Carried as guidance. If the site surfaces it at all it should be clearly marked as informational.

   Fla. Stat. 448.01(1), (2) · The Florida Senate, 2025 Florida Statutes, s. 448.01, last read 6 August 2026

5. Florida·Rest and meal breaks

   No general state meal or rest break requirement for adults

   No requirement

   A proof of a negative. The Florida Administrative Code was not exhaustively swept, so a narrow facility or licensing break rule in an unswept chapter cannot be excluded.

   Fla. Stat. ch. 448, pt. I (Terms and Conditions of Employment) contains no meal or rest period section; the only general break provision in Florida law is Fla. Stat. 450.081(4), which reaches minors only · The Florida Senate, 2025 Florida Statutes, Chapter 448 Part I section index, last read 6 August 2026

6. California·Rest and meal breaks

   One hour of premium pay per workday a meal or rest period is missed

   Binding law

   perCategoryStacking is null because no primary government source resolves whether one workday can carry both a meal premium and a separate rest premium. Any product that costs a missed break must not present a two-hour-per-day figure as settled.

   California Labor Code section 226.7(c) and (d) · California Legislative Information (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov), official text of the Labor Code section 226.7, last read 6 August 2026

7. California·Rest between shifts

   One day's rest in seven

   Binding law

   exemptionConjunction records that the statute's 'or' in Labor Code 556 is encoded conservatively as 'and', and that whether the guarantee is measured per workweek or on a rolling seven days turns on case law no government page restates. Two unresolved readings sit under one 'hard' label.

   California Labor Code sections 551, 552, 554 and 556 · California Legislative Information (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov), official text of the Labor Code sections 551, 552, 554 and 556, last read 6 August 2026

8. California·Predictive scheduling

   Los Angeles Fair Work Week: 14 days advance notice and predictability pay

   Binding law

   Absence of an amending ordinance could not be positively confirmed against a City Clerk legislative index, and four other California city ordinances (San Francisco, Emeryville, Berkeley, unincorporated LA County) are known to exist and are unresearched. The California predictive-scheduling picture is knowingly incomplete.

   Los Angeles Municipal Code Chapter XVIII, Article 5, sections 185.01, 185.02, 185.04, 185.05 and 185.06 (Los Angeles Fair Work Week Ordinance) · City of Los Angeles, Office of Wage Standards, Fair Work Week Information, last read 6 August 2026

9. Japan·Heat and outdoor work

   Mandatory heatstroke reporting system and response procedure

   Binding law

   Typed 'hard' on the strength of the ordinance while every number in it comes from an interpretive circular. If the circular is revised the numbers move without any change to the binding text, and nothing in the file would flag that.

   Ordinance on Industrial Safety and Health (Ministry of Labour Ordinance No. 32 of 1972) Article 612-2, added by MHLW Ordinance No. 57 of 2025; based on Industrial Safety and Health Act Article 22; penalties under Industrial Safety and Health Act Article 119(i) · Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Labour Standards Bureau Circular Kihatsu 0520 No. 6 of 20 May 2025 (official interpretive circular on the amending ordinance), last read 6 August 2026

10. Singapore·Heat and outdoor work

    Hourly shaded rest breaks for heavy outdoor work above WBGT 32C

    Official guidance

    Typed 'guidance' because the numbers have no legislative source, yet MOM calls them required measures and enforces them with stop-work orders. The label under-states the exposure. The same applies to singapore-heat-outdoor-acclimatisation and singapore-heat-outdoor-hourly-wbgt-monitoring.

    MOM Heat Stress Measures for Outdoor Work (revised framework published with MOM press release of 6 September 2024); enforced under the general duty of employers in the Workplace Safety and Health Act 2006, section 12 · Ministry of Manpower, last read 6 August 2026

11. Singapore·Workers under 18

    No night work for anyone under 16

    Binding law

    The prohibition is binding subsidiary legislation but the 23:00 to 06:00 window exists only in MOM guidance; no instrument defines 'night'. A hard rule with an administratively supplied number.

    Employment (Children and Young Persons) Regulations (Rg 1), regulation 5 (prohibition); Ministry of Manpower guidance (the 11pm to 6am window) · Singapore Statutes Online, Attorney-General's Chambers, last read 6 August 2026

12. Japan·Rest between shifts

    Truck drivers: continuous rest period not below 9 hours

    Official guidance

    The numeric block holds TRUCK figures only, with bus and taxi figures narrated in the scopeNote rather than encoded. Any consumer reading numeric alone will apply truck limits to bus and taxi rosters.

    Standards for Improvement of Working Hours etc. of Motor Vehicle Drivers (MHLW Public Notice, kaizen kijun kokuji), as revised and applied from 1 April 2024 · Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, portal on improving long working hours of motor vehicle drivers, truck driver standards page, last read 6 August 2026

13. United Kingdom·Rest between shifts

    24 hours weekly rest, or 48 hours per fortnight

    Binding law

    The 35-hour combined weekly rest reading is deliberately not encoded as a constraint, only as a displaceable default described in prose. Reasonable, but it means the data understates what many UK employers actually owe.

    Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833) regulation 11(1), (2), (4), (6) and (7); exceptions in regulations 20, 21, 22 and 23(a) · legislation.gov.uk, last read 6 August 2026

14. United Kingdom·Workers under 18

    Children of compulsory school age: 7am to 7pm and capped hours

    Binding law

    A pending substitution of s.18 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 (moving the evening limit to 8pm, dropping the Sunday cap, making permits mandatory) is displayed on legislation.gov.uk as in force 'for specified purposes' but is not commenced. The file states the current position correctly; the risk is that a future re-verification reads the displayed text and changes the numbers prematurely.

    Children and Young Persons Act 1933 section 18(1), as amended by the Children (Protection at Work) Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/276) and SI 2000/2548; byelaw power in section 18(2) · legislation.gov.uk, last read 6 August 2026

15. United Kingdom·Hours and overtime limits

    5.6 weeks paid annual leave, bank holidays may be included

    Binding law

    Topic fit is poor and it has no counterpart in the other five files, so it is the rule most likely to be rendered misleadingly.

    Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833) regulation 13(1), regulation 13A(2)(e) and 13A(3), and regulation 15B for irregular hours and part-year workers · legislation.gov.uk, last read 6 August 2026

16. Across the whole registry

    The topic list itself has two gaps

    Two structural gaps in the canonical topic list itself: there is no heat-indoor value (so two indoor rules sit under heat-outdoor) and no leave or weekly-rest value (so annual leave sits under hours-limits and weekly rest days sit under rest-between-shifts). Both are documented and both would be cleaner as their own topics.

17. Across the whole registry

    Nine rule ids no longer describe their contents

    Nine rule ids now contain a topic slug that does not match their topic field, because ids were held stable through the reassignment. Harmless if ids are treated as opaque, actively misleading if anything parses them.

How this stays current

Every rule carries the date its source was last read, and that date is shown next to the citation rather than kept in the file. A test fails the build when any rule drifts past 365 days, so a stale figure stops a deployment instead of quietly reaching a reader. Failing loudly is the point: the failure mode of a legal reference is not being wrong on the day it ships, it is being right on that day and never checked again.

The oldest verification date in the registry today is 6 August 2026. Every source was read in a single pass, which is the reason nothing here has aged yet and also the reason the whole set falls due at once. Law that is expected to move gets read sooner than the deadline. Japan's heatstroke provisions took effect in 2025 and their numbers sit in a circular that can be revised on its own, the proposed United States federal heat standard could be finalised in any quarter, and the United Kingdom has a predictive scheduling regime enacted but not commenced. Those three are the ones worth watching between passes.

If something here is wrong

Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send us, and the ones that come from people who schedule against these rules for a living are worth more than another pass over the same documents. If a figure is wrong, a scope note misses a carve-out, or a rule has changed since we last read it, send it to us with the primary source and we will fix the entry rather than argue with it. Point at the rule title or the citation so we know which of the 94 you mean.