Guides
UK working-time rules for rotas
Every UK rota sits on a legal floor set by the Working Time Regulations: minimum breaks within a shift, minimum rest between shifts, minimum rest each week, and a cap on average weekly hours. This page lists the figures with their official sources — and what each one means when you’re placing shifts.
Rest breaks within the day
Per gov.uk’s rest-breaks guidance, adult workers are entitled to one uninterrupted 20-minute rest break during the working day if they work more than 6 hours. In rota terms: any shift longer than six hours needs a planned break, not an ad-hoc one.
Rest between working days
Workers are entitled to 11 hours of rest between working days (same gov.uk source). This is the rule the close-then-open pair breaks: finish at 1am, start at 9am, and only 8 hours separate the shifts. It’s the most common violation in hospitality and care rotas because each shift looks fine in isolation — only the pair is illegal.
Weekly rest
Each worker is entitled to an uninterrupted 24 hours without any work each week, or an uninterrupted 48 hours each fortnight (same gov.uk source). Rotas that rotate people across seven-day patterns need to keep one full day genuinely clear.
The 48-hour average week
Per gov.uk’s weekly-hours guidance, average working time must not exceed 48 hours a week, normally averaged over 17 weeks. A worker can choose to opt out of the 48-hour cap. Because it’s an average, a heavy week isn’t automatically a violation — but a heavy quarter is, and that only shows up if you track hours across weeks rather than eyeballing one rota at a time.
Night work
Per gov.uk’s night-working guidance, night workers must not work more than an average of 8 hours in a 24-hour period — usually averaged over 17 weeks, extendable up to 52 weeks by agreement. Night work that involves special hazards or heavy mental or physical strain is capped at a hard 8 hours in any 24-hour period, with no averaging.
Under-18s
Young workers get stricter limits: no more than 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, per gov.uk’s weekly-hours guidance. If your rota includes students or apprentices under 18, their ceiling is per-day and per-week — no averaging, no opt-out.
Checking this while you schedule
None of these rules is hard individually — the difficulty is checking them on every edit, every week. Darouta’s Labour Law Guardrails run as you schedule and flag insufficient daily rest, missing breaks, and weekly-hours risks for the jurisdiction you select; night-work and under-18 limits remain yours to check when they apply to your team. These automated checks are operational guidance, not legal advice. See it in the playground — no account needed — or read how to make a staff rota for the full workflow.