Compliance rules
Five rule types, two severities, and one decision that matters more than the rest: which of your rules stop a publish and which only warn.
The five rule types
Rules are per organization, and you can have several of the same type. Each is a number plus a severity.
| Rule | Catches |
|---|---|
| Max hours per week | Overtime thresholds, contracted-hours ceilings, student visa limits. |
| Max consecutive days | The person quietly on their eleventh day because two weeks each looked fine on their own. |
| Min rest between shifts | Clopening — a late finish followed by an early start. The rule most often required by law. |
| Max shifts per day | Split shifts, where you allow them but not three of them. |
| Max hours per day | Daily overtime, which several jurisdictions compute separately from weekly. |
Warning or blocking
This is the setting to think about carefully.
Warning — flagged in the grid and in the pre-flight, and the agent avoids breaking it, but you can publish anyway. Right for internal policy and preferences.
Blocking — the publish stops. Right for anything with a legal or contractual consequence.
Marking everything blocking feels safe and is not: managers who cannot publish a legitimate week start working around the product, and once they are working around it, the blocking rules that matter are just more noise. Block what is genuinely illegal; warn on the rest.
Where the rules are checked
- As you edit — a shift that breaks a rule is flagged when it is saved.
- When the agent drafts — your rules are part of its context, so it works within them rather than proposing weeks you have to fix.
- At publish — the whole-week pre-flight, the one that stops on blocking rules.
Because the check runs on the server, the same rules apply to a shift created through the API or the mobile app. There is no path around them.
Jurisdiction baselines
You do not have to research your own rest periods. Weekwright can check your organization against a known jurisdiction baseline and tell you which rules you are missing relative to it.
Treat it as a starting point that saves you an afternoon, not as legal advice — union agreements, local ordinances and your own contracts sit on top of any statutory baseline, and the product has no way to know about those unless you enter them.
Our public predictive scheduling reference covers what the US state-level laws currently require, with the date each was last checked.
Breaks
Breaks are recorded against a shift as meal, rest or other, and employees start and end them from the time clock.
On Pro, the meal-break compliance analysis answers the question the schedule alone cannot: not "was a break scheduled", but "was it actually taken". In jurisdictions where a missed meal break carries a premium payment, that gap is the expensive one.
Common questions
- Can a rule apply to only some people?
- Rules are organization-wide today. For a per-person limit — a contracted maximum, a visa cap — set the person's availability to reflect it and record the reason in a member note, which the agent reads.
- Does the AI ever break a blocking rule?
- It works within your rules when drafting, and the publish pre-flight is an independent check that runs regardless of how the shifts got there. A blocking rule stops the publish whether a human, the agent, or the API created the shift.
Related
Publishing a schedule
What publishing actually does, the compliance pre-flight that runs first, how people confirm they have seen it, and what happens when you need to change a published week.
Building a week
The five views of the week grid, how to add and move shifts, the bulk actions that save the most time, and what happens when two managers edit at once.
Insights and analytics
The analytical layer on top of the agent: why a person got a shift, how the load falls across weeks, who is drifting, where coverage is thin, and whether breaks are being taken.
Skills and qualifications
Define what a position requires, record who holds what, set an expiry on the certifications that have one, and let the schedule enforce it instead of your memory.