You can configure Dayforce to pay out a premium when an employee misses a meal break they were entitled to. While this functionality was originally introduced to implement California’s meal break legislation, it’s designed to be flexible enough to cover other business needs. In general, it pays out a premium whenever an employee works a specified amount of time without taking a meal break of a specified duration.
Depending on your organization’s needs, meal penalty premiums can be paid out either under an existing pay code or under their own specific pay code that you configure. See Pay Codes.
Related to meal penalty premiums, you can also configure Dayforce so that employees can waive their meal penalty premium by either signing a permanent meal waiver or waiving the meal penalty premium on a per-meal basis. In cases an employee waives an individual meal penalty premium, their supervisor must also waive the premium to prevent it from being paid.
You can configure meal penalties and meal waivers in several different ways. The following features in Dayforce can control how Dayforce pays out meal penalty premiums:
- Meal break penalty settings in the time entry policy: Time entry policies contain the Meal Break Penalty tab with settings that govern when employees receive meal break penalty premiums and when they can waive them.
- Note: These time entry policy settings need to be set only if you want employees to be able to waive their meals on their timesheets. If employees aren’t waiving meals on a case by case basis or meals don’t need to be waived at all and only meal penalty premiums need to be paid out, the configuration is performed using one of the available meal break rules.
- California Meal Break Premium Contiguous Rule: Used to pay out meal break penalty premiums. You can use this rule if you want to treat separate shifts worked back to back or within some period of time as a single shift for the purposes of meal break penalty premiums. For example, an employee works two four-hour shifts on the same day with a one-hour gap in between. If the rule is configured to consider shifts within two hours of each other as contiguous time, Dayforce pays out a meal break premium because the employee is considered to have worked an eight-hour shift.
- Important: Dayforce doesn’t support using this rule and employees waiving meals on the timesheet. Because the time entry policy meal break penalty settings should only be set to configure Dayforce to allow meal waivers on the timesheet, don’t set the meal break settings in the employee’s time entry policy if their pay policy uses this rule.
- California Meal Break Premium Clock Entry Time Based Rule: Used to pay out meal break penalty premiums. You can use this rule if you want Dayforce to examine each worked shift individually to assess whether to pay out meal break penalty premiums. The rule assesses the need for meal break premiums based on individual shifts and doesn't consider the total amount of time employees work in a day if they work multiple shifts. For example, employees are paid meal break penalty premiums if they work five hours without a meal break. An employee who works from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM and again from 1:30 PM to 6:00 PM wouldn’t be paid a meal.
- California Meal Break Premium Rule: This rule is available for customers who have already configured it and are actively using it. It’s recommended that customers use one of the following rules if you’re configuring meal break premium rules for the first time:
Depending on the functionality you want to enable, different configurations need to be performed:
- No per-meal waivers: If employees don’t need to waive meal penalty premiums on a case by case basis in their timesheets, don’t set the meal break settings in the employee’s time entry policy. Instead, use either the California Meal Break Premium Contiguous Rule or the California Meal Break Premium Clock Entry Time Based Rule to implement meal break penalty premiums.
- Per-meal waivers: If employees do need to waive meal penalty premiums on a case by case basis in their timesheets, select the Enable Meal Break Penalties checkbox in the Meal Break Penalty tab of their time entry policy and specify thresholds in the First Meal Break and, optionally, Second Meal Break sections that control how long employees must work for their meal penalty and how long they must work to be able to waive their meals. See Time Entry Policies and Meal Break Penalty Settings.
- You must also configure the California Meal Break Premium Clock Entry Time Based Rule so that meal penalty premiums are paid out.
- Important: Configure the thresholds in the rule to match those in the Meal Break Penalty tab of the time entry policy.
Configure Dayforce to Support Per-Meal Waivers
The following sections include examples to help illustrate the process of configuring Dayforce to support per-meal waivers, where employees can waive individual meals on the timesheet. In the running examples, the example configuration addresses the following business needs.
Employees are entitled to a 30-minute meal for every four hours they work. Employees who miss one or both of these meals receive a meal penalty premium of $7.50 for each meal they miss. However, employees also have the option to permanently waive this premium for all meal breaks by signing a permanent meal waiver. Employees who don't sign this waiver can waive any individual meal break on their timesheet, or at clocks operating in online mode (if they’re configured for meal waivers).
To configure meal penalty premiums and meal waivers, you must do the following: