Legal model

The analysis applies California Labor Code §§ 226.7, 512, 558, and 1194, and IWC Wage Orders 4 and 5. Every figure implements a specific statutory rule as read through the controlling cases — each authority below maps to the rule it drives in this methodology, so a figure can be traced to its legal basis.

A shift spanning five hours or more requires a first meal period; ten hours or more requires a second (Lab. Code § 512(a)). A required meal is compliant when it begins on time and runs at least 30 minutes; each recorded meal resolves to exactly one classification — compliant, late, short, or short and late. Every boundary is exact, with no rounding on either side of it:

The 5- and 10-hour triggers are measured on the shift’s duration — its clock time from the first clock-in to the last clock-out of the work period, including gaps between its segments, and distinct from hours worked (the app surfaces the two as separate columns, “Shift duration” and “Hours worked”). This is a disclosed modeling choice: a 09:00–17:00 workday with a one-hour midday gap spans 8 hours though 7 were worked, and its first-meal deadline runs from 09:00.

A qualifying shift with no recorded meal is labeled “no meal period recorded” and counted as a potential violation. The label is deliberate: employers must provide meal periods, not ensure they are taken (Brinker), and a missing punch does not itself establish that no meal was provided — unrecorded or auto-deducted meals are a known limit of timekeeping data. The figure reports what the record shows; the waiver setting and the case’s facts govern what it means.

Timekeeping data records breaks, not meal periods. Nothing in a punch file says “this one was the lunch”. One shift often holds more than one gap between punches. A two-minute punch-out, a fifteen-minute errand, and a thirty-minute lunch can all fall on the same day. Every label on the Meal Breaks page names one specific gap, “Late · 1st meal” and “Short · 2nd meal” among them. This topic states which gap each label names.

The analysis scores each viable break against the slot it might fill. The score is the time the break was out of compliance: minutes late plus minutes short. Minutes late is how far the break started after that slot’s deadline. Minutes short is how far its length fell under the required length.

A break that was on time contributes zero to the first term. A break of full length contributes zero to the second. The slot takes the lowest score. Two breaks with the same score go to the earlier one.

A compliant break scores zero, because it was neither late nor short. So the earliest compliant break always wins, and the analysis needs no separate rule to prefer it. When no break is compliant, the same score picks the break the employer came closest to providing.

A break counts only when it runs at least as long as the run’s minimum-break-length setting. The Parameters page shows that value. Below it, the break is not treated as an attempted meal at all. Above it, every break is a candidate, however short of compliance it falls.

A gap large enough to separate two work periods is not a break at all. The analysis splits the record into shifts first. Only a gap inside one shift can fill a meal slot. That rule keeps an overnight gap between Monday and Tuesday out of Tuesday’s meal figures.

A workday with one or more potential meal violations carries at most one meal premium (UPS v. Superior Court; Lab. Code § 226.7). The cap binds per day, not per potential violation: an employee whose Wednesday second meal is both late and short, and whose Thursday first meal is missing, carries exactly two meal premiums that week — one for each affected workday, valued at one hour of pay each.

The rest premium cap is separate: also at most one per workday. A single workday can therefore carry up to two premiums — one meal and one rest — and the two caps are never combined into one.

Rest periods are almost never punched, so no rest figure is measured. The analysis estimates instead: it applies a meal-derived violation rate to the shifts that owe rest periods, under one of three modes — selected per analysis and disclosed with every rest figure:

• Match meal, per employee (default) — each employee’s own meal violation rate, applied to that employee’s rest-qualifying shifts.
• Match meal, dataset average — one dataset-wide meal violation rate applied uniformly to every employee.
• Manual — a user-supplied rate, where case facts support a different assumption.

Rest periods owed scale with the shift’s duration, and each boundary belongs to the higher tier — a shift of exactly 6 hours owes two rest periods:

The estimate is arithmetic, not detection, and the rate applies per rest-qualifying shift — not per rest break required: an employee with a 40.0% meal violation rate and 10 rest-qualifying shifts contributes an estimated 4 rest premium workdays. Rest premiums are capped at one per workday — separately from the meal cap (§ 226.7; UPS) — and valued at one hour of pay each. The worked example on the Methodology overview applies this estimate to its three-shift fixture.

Under Lab. Code § 512(a), an employee may voluntarily waive the first meal period when the workday is six hours or less. Whether valid waivers exist is a legal and factual question the timekeeping record cannot answer — so the analysis never decides it: it flags eligibility and leaves the treatment to a case-level setting.

• Flagged waiver-eligible — a shift spanning more than 5 and up to 6 hours, with no recorded meal. A shift of exactly 5 hours is not waiver-eligible (its meal is simply required); a shift of exactly 6 hours is.
• Shifts under 5 hours require no meal period, so a missing meal punch on them is neither a potential violation nor waiver-eligible.
• Default treatment — waivers are assumed not to exist: waiver-eligible shifts count as potential violations until the case-level waiver setting excludes them.
• With the setting on, waiver-eligible shifts are excluded from the meal counts, and the treatment in effect is disclosed alongside every figure.
• Second-meal-period waivers (shifts over 10 and up to 12 hours with a compliant first meal) are not modeled — second-meal violation counts may include waivable shifts.