The scene is always the same. Someone closes at 22:30, gets out at 23:00 once the till and the tidy-up are done, and is on the opening shift at 08:00 the next morning. On paper it looks fine: they slept. In practice nine hours passed between two shifts, and that plan does not stand up.
Daily rest is the rule most often broken without any bad intent. Nobody sets out to breach it, it simply never gets counted, because the number you need is not on the shift, it is in the gap between two shifts, and that gap appears nowhere on the sheet.
What the rules say
In the UK the reference is the Working Time Regulations 1998: a worker is entitled to eleven consecutive hours of rest in each 24-hour period. Consecutive is the word that matters. You cannot add up fragments, and a weekly average does not cover it.
On top of that sits weekly rest: 24 uninterrupted hours in each seven-day period, or 48 hours in each fortnight.
Worth saying: the threshold is not the same everywhere. Eleven hours is the floor set by the EU working time directive and mirrored in the UK regulations, but Spain, for instance, requires twelve hours between one working day and the next. If you have people in more than one country, check the number country by country.
The sum almost nobody does
The recurring mistake is not ignoring the rule, it is measuring it from the wrong time. A shift does not end when the shutter comes down, it ends when the person leaves. If the plan says "close at 22:00" but the till and the reset genuinely take half an hour, the shift ends at 22:30 and the eleven hours start there.
Three places where the sum breaks almost every time:
- the close that overruns and gets logged as if it finished on schedule;
- a change of site, with travel time that appears nowhere;
- the split shift, where everyone focuses on the long gap in the middle and forgets the night.
Exceptions exist, but they are not a free pass
The regulations allow the daily rest to be interrupted or reduced in specific cases, notably shift changeovers, split working patterns and on-call arrangements, and workforce agreements can adjust a fair amount.
The part that matters is that an exception does not delete the rest, it moves it. Where daily rest is cut, the worker is owed equivalent compensatory rest. Treating the derogations as a general licence to squeeze the gap catches up with you, and rarely on your own terms.
This article is practical orientation rather than legal advice. Your sector agreement or contracts may be more generous than the statutory floor, and where there is doubt that is the document to read.
How it lands in the weekly plan
One practical rule solves ninety per cent of cases: whoever closes does not open the next day. If they really must, the following opening shift starts later, and that gets written into the plan up front, not discovered afterwards.
Three more worth fixing:
- every close-then-open sequence needs checking by hand if your tool does not check it for you;
- use real clock-out times in the calculation, not planned ones;
- when you genuinely need the exception, schedule the compensatory rest at the same moment you schedule the overrun, otherwise it becomes a debt nobody ever settles.
There is also a reason that has nothing to do with enforcement: nine hours between shifts takes away sleep, not leisure. We covered what that does in the piece on long shifts and attention, and it shows up at the till long before it shows up in an inspection.
The check belongs before, not after
Auditing rest periods at month end, once the hours have already been worked, only tells you how exposed you are. The useful check happens while the plan is being built, when moving a shift still costs nothing.
It is exactly the kind of constraint a spreadsheet does not know about, and that a human being stops verifying somewhere around the twentieth row.
Sked Solve treats the eleven hours as a planning constraint rather than an after-the-fact audit: shifts that break it are never proposed. See how it works at Sked Solve.