WA · 4 rules · reviewed 2026-05
Washington scheduling laws
Washington's centerpiece is Seattle's Secure Scheduling Ordinance (2017) for retail and food service with 500+ employees. The state also has paid sick leave for all workers and an annually-adjusted minimum wage.
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 4 rules apply regardless of industry; 2 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.
Seattle Secure Scheduling — 14-day advance notice
Seattle Mun. Code §14.22Covered employers (retail or food-service with 500+ employees) in Seattle must post schedules at least 14 days in advance.
Applies to:RestaurantsRetail
In Weekwright: Publish weeks ahead with one click; audit log captures every change after publication for compliance teams to review.
Compensation for last-minute changes
Seattle Mun. Code §14.22.060Adding a shift or extending an existing shift on short notice = 1 hour additional pay. Cancelling a scheduled shift with less than 24 hours notice = at least half the cancelled shift's wages.
Applies to:RestaurantsRetail
In Weekwright: Bulk-modify and bulk-delete-week preserve the previous schedule in the archive — you can compute compensation owed from the diff, not from memory.
Right to rest between shifts (Seattle)
Seattle Mun. Code §14.22.040Employees can decline shifts scheduled less than 10 hours after the previous shift. Working through the rest period requires 1.5x pay.
In Weekwright: MIN_REST_HOURS_BETWEEN_SHIFTS preset enforces 10-hour rest as WARNING or BLOCKING per your tolerance.
Statewide paid sick leave
RCW §49.46.210All Washington employees accrue 1 hour of paid sick time per 40 hours worked, available for use after 90 days.
In Weekwright: Time-off requests with type 'Sick' flow into the conflict detector — proposed shifts on approved sick days flag automatically before publish.
Primary sources
Read the law itself. These are the statutes, ordinances and agencies the rules above are taken from.
Washington 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 Washington schedule actually checks.
Weekwright enforces the baseline for where each shift happens, before you publish. Free for a single location, up to 20 employees.