California law requires duty-free meal and rest breaks for non-exempt employees. The meal periods can be unpaid, but rest breaks must be paid. For each workday an employee cannot take a lawful meal period, the employer must pay one hour of additional pay, and the same for rest period violations.  

To comply with California’s meal period law, employers must provide a 30-minute unpaid break during which employees have no work duties and are free from employer control. Eating while working at your desk, monitoring work facilities, or driving between appointments or deliveries does not usually qualify as a duty-free meal period. Employees that remain “on call”—having to respond to a call, text, or other message—during the meal period are not free of their employer’s control.  

The first meal break must ordinarily be provided before the employee works more than five (5) hours. A second meal period must be provided before the employee works more than 10 hours in a day.   

Employers that have a written meal period policy that meets these requirements may still be liable for missed meal periods if they pressure employees to work through or interrupt their breaks. 

California law also requires 10-minute, paid “rest periods” for each 4 hour segment of work. Like meal periods, rest breaks must be free of all duties and control. Employers must “authorize and permit” such breaks by informing their employees that they have the right to the breaks and relinquishing all control. Unlike meal periods, the rest breaks count as “hours worked” and must be paid. Employees whose pay is solely based on their output—such as commission salespeople, or “piece rate” employees, like delivery drivers or certain construction workers—must be paid additional wages (typically an hourly rate) for this rest time.  

Kaufmann & Gropman attorneys have recovered meal and rest break premium pay for a wide variety of workers, such as retail store staff, hotel assistant managers, truck drivers, dispatchers, emergency medical personnel, flooring installers and other construction workers, and employees who have been misclassified as “exempt.”