ME · 3 rules · reviewed 2026-07
Maine scheduling laws
Maine caps MANDATORY overtime rather than overtime itself — no employee can be forced to work more than 80 hours of overtime in any consecutive two-week period. For nurses it goes further: a refusal to work beyond 12 consecutive hours cannot be disciplined.
This is a reference, not legal advice. Every rule below links to its primary source — a statute, an ordinance, or the enforcing agency — so you can read the law rather than a summary of a summary. Consult counsel before relying on any of it.
2 of these 3 rules apply regardless of industry; 1 bind only certain sectors, and each one says which. Most US predictive-scheduling law is municipal, so where a rule comes from a city ordinance its name says so — a company can easily have one location covered and two not.
80-hour mandatory overtime cap per two weeks
26 M.R.S.A. §603An employee cannot be required to work more than 80 hours of overtime in any consecutive 2-week period, where overtime means hours beyond 40 in a calendar week. Voluntary hours beyond that are a different question from mandated ones.
In Weekwright: MAX_HOURS_PER_WEEK enforces the weekly boundary the cap is measured from, and the payroll export splits overtime per ISO week rather than per pay period — so a two-week total is the sum of two figures you can actually defend rather than an average that hides one heavy week.
Exceptions to the cap
26 M.R.S.A. §603The 80-hour limit does not apply to work responding to a Governor-declared emergency, essential public services (utilities, snowplowing, road maintenance, telecommunications), work protecting public health or safety outside the normal course of business, seasonal employers operating under 26 weeks a year, or medical interns and residents.
In Weekwright: Severity is per rule, so a seasonal operator who is genuinely exempt can run the same cap at WARNING instead of BLOCKING and keep the visibility without the block. Changing a rule is itself audit-logged.
Nurses: 12 consecutive hours and the 10-hour recovery
26 M.R.S.A. §603A nurse cannot be disciplined for refusing to work more than 12 consecutive hours except in an unforeseen emergency where overtime is a last resort for patient safety. A nurse mandated beyond 12 hours must then receive at least 10 consecutive hours off immediately afterwards.
Applies to:Healthcare
In Weekwright: This is exactly a pair of rules: MAX_HOURS_PER_DAY at 12 and MIN_REST_HOURS_BETWEEN_SHIFTS at 10, both BLOCKING. The 10-hour recovery is the one people forget, because it only bites on the shift AFTER the long one — and a rest rule is the only thing that catches it at publish time.
Primary sources
Read the law itself. These are the statutes, ordinances and agencies the rules above are taken from.
Maine by industry
The same statutes read for one vertical, with the scheduling patterns that vertical actually runs.
Other states
Again, because it matters: this is not legal advice. It is a reading aid over primary sources, maintained by a software company rather than a law firm. It surfaces obvious gaps so you can act on them — it does not tell you whether a specific ordinance applies to your specific business. Consult counsel for that. Found something out of date? hello@weekwright.com — a correction to a primary source is welcome from anyone, customer or not.
Rules your Maine schedule actually checks.
Weekwright enforces the baseline for where each shift happens, before you publish. Free for a single location, up to 20 employees.