Understanding Meal Penalties

• Employees in the state of California must take a lunch break when they work 6 or more hours in one day. The meal break must be free of all work, away from the work area, and a minimum of 30 mins. This break can be paid or unpaid.

• The lunch break must be taken before the start of the 5th hour of work. Ex: Employee starts at 8:00am, they must take their lunch before 1:00pm; 12:59pm at the latest.

• If an employee is working 6 hours or less, they can waive their meal break.

• Employees will need to sign a waiver that they worked 6 or less hours and are going to waive their meal break. Based on your attorney's stance, the employee can sign the meal break waiver either every day or once at the time of hire with a blanket waiver.

• If an employee is not offered a meal break within the above guidelines a meal penalty is charged to the employer, and the employee is paid 1 extra hour of pay. This does not count towards daily or weekly overtime totals.

• Meal penalties appear automatically on employee time sheets in accordance with the above rules.

• Meal penalties can be cancelled if they appear incorrectly on the employee timesheet by the manager.

• If an employee signs a meal waiver this does not mean that they do not need to take a lunch. A meal waiver only lets employees waive a lunch break if they work 6 hours or less. If an employee works more than 6 hours a day, they must take a lunch break or accrue a meal penalty.

• Managers should not cancel meal penalties for employees that have signed a meal waiver and work more than 6 hours.
  

• Please review our article on how to cancel meal penalties in the system: Meal Penalty - Managing and Cancelling (California)