Lunch Break Calculator

Your Shift Timeline

Common Shift Patterns

One-click presets for office, diner, nursing, retail, and warehouse schedules with their typical breaks.

Gross Shift → Net Paid (by lunch length)

Working overnight? The Shift Calculator handles wrap-around and differentials.

The Formula

Break Rules Reference

Source: US Department of Labor and California DIR.

No saved shifts yet. Tap "Save to History" to remember up to six timeline snapshots.

How to Carve Out Your Lunch

1. Set clock-in and clock-out to your real shift times — the amber bar spans the full shift.
2. Add each unpaid break (lunch, dinner) with its minutes; each appears as a dashed notch carved from the bar.
3. Leave short paid rest breaks of 5 to 20 minutes out of the unpaid list — they stay in your paid total.
4. Read net paid hours from the summary line, then multiply by your hourly rate for gross shift pay.
5. Save the snapshot and compare it to your pay stub to catch any incorrect auto-deductions.

Why This Calculator Exists

In 2026, a line cook who clocks in at 11:00 and out at 21:00 assumes a clean ten-hour shift, then opens their pay stub and finds only nine paid hours. The missing hour is the two unpaid thirty-minute meal breaks the restaurant carved out, and that gap is the single most common payroll surprise in hourly work. The Lunch Break Calculator makes the deduction visible by drawing the whole shift as a timeline bar and physically removing the unpaid lunch segment, so the net paid hours are obvious rather than buried in an HR system.

The rule that lunch is usually unpaid comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the federal regulations interpreting it. Under 29 CFR 785.19, a bona fide meal period — typically 30 minutes or more during which the employee is completely relieved of duty — does not count as hours worked and need not be paid. Shorter rest breaks tell the opposite story: 29 CFR 785.18 says breaks of 5 to 20 minutes are common in industry, are counted as hours worked, and must be paid. This calculator separates the two so paid coffee breaks stay in the total while unpaid meals are carved out.

There is no federal law requiring employers to provide meal or rest breaks at all; the FLSA only governs whether breaks that are given must be paid. Break mandates come from the states. California is the strictest: a 30-minute unpaid meal period is required for shifts over 5 hours and a paid 10-minute rest break for every 4 hours worked, with a penalty of one hour of pay owed when a required break is denied. New York, Washington, Oregon, and Illinois have their own meal-period laws. The timeline view helps workers in these states confirm they actually received the break the law requires.

The arithmetic is a subtraction in minutes. Convert clock-in and clock-out to minutes past midnight, take the difference to get the gross shift, sum all unpaid break minutes, and subtract: net paid minutes = gross minutes − unpaid break minutes. Divide by 60 for net paid hours. A shift from 09:00 to 17:00 is 480 gross minutes; a 30-minute unpaid lunch leaves 450 paid minutes, or 7.5 paid hours. The bar makes that 30-minute notch a literal gap in the colored shift block.

Multiple breaks are the norm in hospitality and long shifts, which is why this tool lets you add as many break segments as you need. A 12-hour nursing shift might carry one 30-minute unpaid meal; a diner double might carry a lunch and a dinner break; a warehouse 10-hour might pair an unpaid 30-minute meal with a paid 15-minute rest. Adding each break as its own line keeps the math transparent and lets you toggle a break between paid and unpaid to see the effect on the total instantly.

Net paid hours feed directly into pay. Multiply net paid hours by the hourly rate to get gross pay for the shift, and if the day pushes total weekly hours past 40, the overage is owed at the FLSA overtime rate of 1.5×. Auto-deduct policies — where a system automatically removes 30 minutes for lunch whether or not the employee took it — are a frequent source of wage-and-hour disputes, because if the worker actually worked through lunch, that time is compensable. Comparing the calculator's net against the pay stub is a quick way to catch an erroneous auto-deduction.

Because the net paid hours are the foundation for the day's pay, this tool pairs naturally with our Shift Calculator for overnight wrap and differential pay, and with the Salary to Hourly Calculator for pricing each net hour. Together they let an hourly worker reconstruct exactly what a shift should pay, break by break, before the check ever arrives.