Polish labour law frames a restaurant roster from three sides: a daily norm of eight hours with a weekly average of forty, at least eleven hours of uninterrupted daily rest, and supplements for overtime and for night hours. The roster is a plan; the working time record is what actually happened, and only the second one is evidence.
Working time norm — from the Labour Code, art. 129 § 1: working time may not exceed 8 hours a day and, on average, 40 hours in an average five-day working week within the adopted settlement period.
Daily rest — from art. 132 § 1: in every twenty-four-hour cycle the employee is entitled to at least 11 hours of uninterrupted rest. The article names its own exceptions, and they are not retold here.
Settlement period — the stretch over which the weekly average is counted. Its length is named in the article together with its conditions; it acts on the weekly average and not at all on the daily norm.
Roster and record — the roster is an intention, the record is an event. An inspection compares the second against the first, not the first against the law.
Night supplement — from art. 151⁸ § 1: an employee performing work during the night hours is entitled to a supplement for every hour worked in that period, tied to a figure named in the article itself.
The working time norm: eight hours a day, forty a week on average
Everything else on this page hangs on one sentence of the Labour Code. Working time may not exceed 8 hours a day and, on average, 40 hours in an average five-day working week within the adopted settlement period (Dziennik Ustaw, Kodeks pracy, consolidated text, Dz.U. 2025 poz. 277, art. 129 § 1, opened 28.08.2026). Two numbers, and they behave differently. Every reference to the code on this page points to the consolidated text on the Sejm ELI service, the version with later amendments applied, and not to the file as promulgated in Dziennik Ustaw; the difference can be substantive, and art. 129 § 3 and art. 151² § 1 below are where it shows.
Eight hours a day is a hard edge: not averaged, not carried forward. Forty hours a week is the opposite — the code itself calls it an average, and the averaging happens inside the settlement period. A week of forty-six and a week of thirty-four are not a breach of the weekly norm if the period closes level.
There is a second ceiling, forgotten more often than the first: weekly working time together with overtime may not exceed an average of 48 hours in the adopted settlement period (art. 131 § 1). Overtime has its own average, eight hours above the ordinary one.
How the norm of a period is actually counted
The code does not leave this to arithmetic taste. The norm is counted by multiplying 40 hours by the number of full weeks in the period, then adding 8 hours for each remaining day falling from Monday to Friday; every public holiday falling in the period on a day other than Sunday reduces the norm by 8 hours (art. 130 § 1 and § 2).
Period norm = 40 h × Full weeks + 8 h × Remaining Mon-Fri days − 8 h × Holidays not on Sunday
Full weeks— whole seven-day weeks inside the settlement period, a count;Remaining Mon-Fri days— days left after the whole weeks, counted only from Monday to Friday, a count;Holidays not on Sunday— public holidays inside the period falling on any day except Sunday, a count;- the result is hours for the whole period.
Worked on stated assumptions, not on a specific calendar: a period of exactly 4 full weeks plus 2 remaining weekdays and no holiday gives 40 × 4 + 8 × 2 = 176 hours. Put one holiday on a Tuesday inside that period and the norm becomes 176 − 8 = 168 hours. The norm dropped by a whole shift, the guests did not disappear, and every hour above the new figure is overtime. Habit says everyone works their usual month; the code says the month changed size.
The settlement period: why its length decides a season
The default settlement period may not exceed 4 months (art. 129 § 1). In every working time system it may be extended, but not beyond 12 months, where objective, technical or work-organisation reasons justify it and the general rules on the protection of health and safety are kept (art. 129 § 2).
For a venue with a season this is the most consequential choice on the page. A long period lets a heavy July be levelled by a quiet November inside the same average. A short period does not: everything above the norm of July is settled as overtime in July. The same roster and the same people produce a different payroll line purely because of the length of the period written into the workplace rules.
The choice is not free and it is not silent: the code says who sets working time systems, rosters and settlement periods and by what instrument, and the extension has to be agreed in the way the article prescribes (art. 150). That procedure is a formality with its own conditions written into the article, and half a procedure is worse than none, so it is not walked through here.
The roster itself has a deadline, and it is in the code
The roster may be drawn up in paper or electronic form (the code words it w postaci papierowej lub elektronicznej) for a stretch shorter than the settlement period, but covering at least 1 month, and the employer hands it to the employee at least 1 week before the start of the period it covers (art. 129 § 3).
A venue that publishes the roster on Saturday for Monday is outside a rule written in numbers, and the numbers are one month and one week. This is the cheapest frame rule to satisfy: it costs planning, not money.
Eleven hours of daily rest: the rule that shapes the roster
In every twenty-four-hour cycle the employee is entitled to at least 11 hours of uninterrupted rest (art. 132 § 1). The article names its own reservations and the categories it does not cover; those live in the article and are not paraphrased here.
Eleven hours sounds generous until it meets a kitchen. A close at 23:30 with paperwork and cleaning until 00:15 puts the earliest lawful start at 11:15 the next day. The delivery arrives at 08:00, prep for lunch starts at 09:00. The person who closed cannot open, and no goodwill changes that: the rest is uninterrupted, so a nap in the middle does not restart it.
This, not the daily norm and not the weekly average, is the rule that quietly decides the shape of a roster: it decides who can be on the morning after a late close, and therefore how many people the venue needs. That arithmetic is on the page about how many people a shift needs; here it is only the constraint the arithmetic has to pass.
One related number belongs in the same head. A shift of at least 6 hours carries a right to a break of at least 15 minutes; a shift longer than 9 hours carries another 15; a shift longer than 16 hours carries one more (art. 134 § 1). Those breaks count into working time.
Weekly rest: thirty-five hours, not one day off
In every week the employee is entitled to at least 35 hours of uninterrupted rest, including the 11 hours of daily rest (art. 133 § 1). In the cases the code lists, and where an employee changes over to a different shift, the weekly uninterrupted rest may cover fewer hours, but never fewer than 24 (art. 133 § 2).
Thirty-five hours is not a day off. It is a day off plus most of the day around it. A venue that gives one free day — the calendar day from midnight to midnight — gives 24 hours, and reaches 35 only if the shift before ended early or the shift after starts late. Most rosters that fail this rule fail it while sincerely believing they gave a day off.
The classic breach: Friday late close, Saturday day shift, Saturday late close, Sunday off, Monday morning. The Sunday looks like rest. Measured from the end of the Saturday close to the start of the Monday morning it can come out well under 35 hours, and nobody notices because nobody counted from clock to clock.
| Rule of the code | The figure | How it breaks in a venue | What is usually put in its place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily norm | 8 hours a day, art. 129 § 1 | A quick extra hour after close, repeated | Planned relief on the closing shift |
| Weekly average | 40 hours on average, art. 129 § 1 | A heavy week never levelled inside the period | A settlement period long enough for the season |
| Overtime ceiling | 48 hours on average with overtime, art. 131 § 1 | Overtime used as a permanent staffing method | One more part-time person on the peak days |
| Daily rest | 11 hours uninterrupted, art. 132 § 1 | Close-then-open on the same person | Closing and opening split between two people |
| Weekly rest | 35 hours uninterrupted, art. 133 § 1 | A day off measured as a calendar day | Rest measured clock to clock, not date to date |
| Roster notice | 1 month covered, 1 week ahead, art. 129 § 3 | Roster published two days before | A fixed publication day every month |
Night work: which hours count and what supplement is due
The night hours cover 8 hours between 21:00 and 07:00 (art. 151⁷ § 1). Read that twice: it is eight hours somewhere inside a ten-hour window, and which eight is fixed by the employer, not by the shift. Two venues on the same street can have different night hours and both be right.
An employee whose roster covers at least 3 hours of night work in every twenty-four-hour cycle, or at least a quarter of whose working time in the settlement period falls within the night hours, is a night worker (art. 151⁷ § 2). That status is not decorative: the same article limits the working time of a night worker to 8 hours a day where the work is particularly dangerous or involves heavy physical or mental effort (art. 151⁷ § 3).
The night supplement has no fixed amount, and that is the point
Two traps sit inside that one sentence, and both are expensive.
The first: the hourly rate resulting from the minimum remuneration is not the statutory minimum hourly rate. The minimum remuneration for work from 1 January 2026 is 4 806 PLN a month and the minimum hourly rate is 31.40 PLN (Dziennik Ustaw, Rozporzadzenie Rady Ministrow, Dz.U. 2025 poz. 1242, § 1 and § 2, opened 28.08.2026) — but the second figure governs a different kind of contract and is not the base of the night supplement. That base is the monthly minimum divided by the nominal working hours of the month in question.
The second: because the nominal hours differ from month to month, the night supplement in money differs too. On stated assumptions, not as a norm: in a month with a nominal 168 hours the hourly rate from the minimum is 4 806 ÷ 168 = 28.6071 PLN and the supplement is 5.72 PLN per night hour; in a month with a nominal 176 hours it is 4 806 ÷ 176 = 27.3068 PLN and the supplement is 5.46 PLN. Same law, same wage, two amounts. Any table printing one fixed night supplement for the whole year is wrong several times a year.
Night supplement per hour = 0.20 × (Monthly minimum remuneration ÷ Nominal hours of that month)
Monthly minimum remuneration— the statutory monthly minimum in force in that month, PLN;Nominal hours of that month— the norm of the month counted by the rule of art. 130, hours;- the result is PLN per hour of work falling inside the night hours.
The figure ages by design: the minimum remuneration is set separately for each year, so any night-supplement amount carries the date of the act it came from. The two amounts above are counted from the figure in force from 1 January 2026 and from nothing else.
Overtime: the supplement and where it is grounded in the code
Work performed above the norms binding on the employee, and work above the extended daily working time resulting from the system and roster binding on the employee, is overtime (art. 151 § 1). The same article allows it in two situations only: a rescue action to protect life, health, property or the environment, and the special needs of the employer.
Overtime on the second ground is capped: it may not exceed 150 hours in a calendar year for an individual employee, unless a collective agreement, the work rules or the employment contract set a different number (art. 151 § 3 and § 4).
The supplement at the higher rate is also due for each overtime hour arising from exceeding the average weekly norm in the settlement period (art. 151¹ § 2).
What the supplement is counted from
This matters for the arithmetic further down. The supplement is counted from the wage base, not from the fully loaded cost of an hour. A calculation that multiplies the fully loaded cost by one and a half is therefore an upper estimate, and it is named as one here rather than dressed up as precision.
There is also a route that does not go through money at all. In exchange for time worked in overtime the employer may, on a request from the employee submitted in paper or electronic form, grant time off in the same amount; without such a request the employer grants time off by the end of the settlement period in an amount half as much again as the overtime hours worked, and in that case no overtime supplement is due (art. 151² § 1, § 2 and § 3). Thirteen overtime hours become nineteen and a half hours of time off, and the payroll line does not move. The form of that request is easy to take from an out-of-date version, so it is worth naming plainly: the code sets paper form and electronic form side by side and does not require written form in this provision — the same pair governs the roster under art. 129 § 3 above.
The working time record: not a roster, but a record of what happened
The employer keeps a record of the employee's working time for the purpose of correctly determining their remuneration and other work-related entitlements, and makes that record available to the employee on request (art. 149 § 1). Hours are not recorded for employees covered by the task-based working time system, for employees managing the workplace on behalf of the employer, and for employees receiving a lump sum for overtime or for work at night (art. 149 § 2).
Two words carry the whole section: keeps and record. Not plans, not approves. The roster is a document of intent produced before the month; the record is a document of fact produced during it. A venue that prints the roster at the end of the month, calls it the record and files it has kept a copy of its own intention. The practical test is one question long: if two people swapped shifts on the fourteenth, does the document show the swap?
Hours from the record are the input to the cost of an hour, to the labour share of revenue and to every staffing decision. Turning them into money is the subject of the true cost of one hour of work and of the labour cost percentage; this page supplies the hours and the rule that makes them evidence.
Three gaps between roster and record that any inspection sees
Gap = Hours in the record − Hours in the roster
Hours in the record— hours actually worked by one person in one month, taken from the working time record, hours;Hours in the roster— hours planned for the same person in the same month, hours;- the result is hours, and the sign is part of the answer.
A positive gap is work that was not planned. A negative gap is either paid absence or under-delivery, and those are different things with different prices. Averaging them together is how a venue concludes that the gap is about zero while paying for both.
Gap one: the closing hour that nobody plans
The roster says the shift ends at 23:00. The record says 23:45, every Friday and Saturday, for one person. Forty-five minutes times eight nights is six hours a month, and because the venue never planned them they are overtime — often the kind falling at night, which carries the higher supplement.
Gap two: the cover that was never written down
Someone stays for a colleague. Both know. Neither document changes. The roster shows the plan and the record, if kept honestly, shows the truth — and the two disagree in a way that looks exactly like a mistake. If the record is not kept honestly the hours simply vanish, and they reappear as a claim later.
Gap three: the negative gap that reads as a saving
A person is rostered for 168 hours and the record shows 150. Eighteen hours less looks like an underspend. It is either an absence with a legal treatment of its own or a shift that was cut, and neither belongs in the same average as the positive gaps.
| Person | Hours in the roster | Hours in the record | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line cook A | 168 | 181 | +13 |
| Line cook B | 168 | 150 | −18 |
| Waiter C | 120 | 128 | +8 |
| Bar D | 160 | 160 | 0 |
Netted together those four give +3 hours and a comfortable conclusion. Split by sign they give +21 hours to be paid at the price of an overtime hour and −18 hours that need a reason. The comfortable conclusion was arithmetic, and it was wrong about both halves.
Watching that split month after month is the job of a numbers screen rather than of a spreadsheet reopened when someone remembers — the discipline described in reporting automation and the numbers an owner actually looks at, applied to hours instead of revenue. Building the screen is dashboards, and the joined-up view underneath it is analytics.
Cheaper: overtime or one more person, counted through the cost of an hour
The question is almost always answered with the wrong pair of numbers: the hourly wage rate against the overtime rate. That comparison decides for overtime every time, because a wage rate is smaller than the full cost of employing somebody. The honest comparison uses the fully loaded cost of an hour on both sides.
Overtime hour price = Fully loaded hourly cost × (1 + Supplement rate)
Fully loaded hourly cost— everything the venue pays for one hour of one person's work, counted by the method of the page on the cost of an hour, PLN per hour;Supplement rate— the share named in the code for the case at hand: the higher rate for night, Sunday and holiday overtime, the lower rate for any other day, a dimensionless share;- the result is PLN per hour, and it is an upper estimate, because the supplement is counted from the wage base of art. 151¹ § 3 and not from the fully loaded cost.
Check backwards: 63.00 ÷ 42.00 = 1.50, the multiplier that went in.
Hiring one more person carries costs that do not depend on how many hours they work — recruitment, medical examinations, uniform, induction, the equipment they need whether they work 40 hours or 4. Those are the fixed part.
Indifference point in hours = Fixed part of the cost of one more person ÷ (Overtime hour price − Fully loaded hourly cost)
Fixed part of the cost of one more person— the monthly cost that does not move with their hours, PLN per month;Overtime hour priceandFully loaded hourly cost— from the formula above, PLN per hour;- the result is hours per month: above it, covering the demand with overtime costs more than hiring.
Check backwards: 42.86 × 21.00 = 900.06 PLN, which returns the fixed part.
Two degenerate cases, printed rather than hidden. If the supplement rate is zero the denominator is zero and the point does not exist: with no supplement, extra hours from an existing person are simply cheaper. If the fixed part is zero the point is zero hours, which signals that the fixed part has not been counted rather than that hiring is free.
The demand side of the same decision — how many hours the venue will need next month — belongs to demand forecasting and to forecasting. This page only says what an hour above the frame costs.
Building a roster so the frame holds without recounting by hand
Every rule above is checkable by a machine before the roster is published, and none is checkable reliably by a person reading a grid at eleven at night. The checks, in the order of how often they are broken:
- rest between the end of one shift and the start of the next, per person, against 11 hours;
- uninterrupted rest inside each week, per person, measured clock to clock, against 35 hours;
- planned hours for the period against the norm counted by the rule of art. 130, per person;
- planned hours plus expected overtime against the 48-hour average;
- night hours per person, to see who is becoming a night worker within the meaning of art. 151⁷ § 2;
- publication date against the one-week rule of art. 129 § 3.
None of that is artificial intelligence and should not be sold as such: it is six comparisons and a calendar. What it needs is one place where shifts, people and hours live together rather than in a printed grid, a group chat and somebody's memory — that is what shifts and people and tasks are for, and what the general account of what can be handed to a system describes for other processes.
For a venue starting from paper the order of work matters more than the tooling. The four thresholds at which automation starts paying for itself are in where to begin, and the cost side is in what process automation costs. A group with more than one site has a further problem — the same frame has to hold in every kitchen at once, the subject of running a chain from one screen.
The legal side of opening and running the venue at all sits on food safety approval and HACCP. Working time is one frame among several, and the one that touches the roster every week.
What to look at once a month so the gap stops accumulating
Once a month, on a fixed day, four numbers per person and one per venue.
Per person: hours in the roster, hours in the record, the gap with its sign, and night hours. Four columns, no interpretation yet. The interpretation is the second pass: every positive gap gets a reason and a supplement rate, every negative gap gets a reason and a treatment.
Per venue: the sum of positive gaps in hours, priced at the overtime hour price. That number is what the frame cost the venue this month, and it is what to compare against the fixed part of one more person.
What not to do: net the gaps against each other, or carry an unexplained gap into the next month. A gap not explained in the month it arose never will be — the shift is gone, the people have moved on, and only the two documents remain, disagreeing.
None of this promises that an inspection will find nothing. It promises something narrower: that the venue knows what its own two documents say before anyone else reads them.
Frequently asked questions
What is the daily and weekly working time norm in Poland?
Working time may not exceed 8 hours a day and, on average, 40 hours in an average five-day working week within the adopted settlement period, under art. 129 § 1 of the Labour Code. The daily figure is a hard edge; the weekly figure is explicitly an average, and the averaging happens inside the settlement period. Together with overtime, weekly time may not exceed an average of 48 hours in that period under art. 131 § 1.
How many hours of uninterrupted daily rest are required?
At least 11 hours in every twenty-four-hour cycle, under art. 132 § 1 of the Labour Code. The rest has to be uninterrupted, so a break in the middle does not restart the count, and the article names its own reservations and the categories it does not cover. In practice this decides whether the person who closed the venue can open it the next morning.
Is a night supplement mandatory for restaurant staff?
Yes. An employee performing work during the night hours is entitled to a supplement for each hour worked in that period, amounting to 20 % of the hourly rate resulting from the minimum remuneration for work, under art. 151⁸ § 1. The night hours are 8 hours between 21:00 and 07:00 under art. 151⁷ § 1, and which eight is fixed by the employer. The amount in money changes from month to month, because the nominal hours of the month change.
What is the difference between a roster and a working time record?
The roster is a plan written before the month; the record is a document of what actually happened, kept by the employer under art. 149 § 1 for the purpose of correctly determining remuneration and other entitlements, and made available to the employee on request. The same article names the employees for whom hours are not recorded. A roster printed at the end of the month and filed as a record is still a roster.
Which document does an inspection compare against what?
It compares the record against the roster and against the pay, not the roster against the law. An internally consistent roster therefore proves very little on its own: what matters is whether what happened matches what was planned and what was paid. The gap between the two documents, person by person and with its sign kept, is the thing worth watching before anyone else looks at it.
Is overtime cheaper than hiring one more person?
Up to a point, and the point is countable. Compare the fully loaded cost of an hour multiplied by one plus the supplement rate against the same fully loaded cost plus the fixed monthly cost of one more person. Below a certain number of hours a month overtime wins; above it, hiring does. Comparing an overtime rate against a bare wage rate always decides for overtime, and always for the wrong reason.
How do I find the point where overtime stops being cheaper?
Divide the fixed part of the cost of one more person by the difference between the overtime hour price and the ordinary fully loaded hourly cost. With a fully loaded cost of 42.00 PLN, the 50 % supplement and a fixed part of 900 PLN a month, the point is 900 ÷ 21.00 = 42.86 hours a month. With the 100 % supplement the same fixed part crosses over at 21.43 hours, because the difference per hour doubles.
Compare last month's rostered hours against the recorded hours, person by person, and keep the sign. A positive gap costs more than it looks: it is paid at the price of an overtime hour, not at the wage rate. The rest of that arithmetic, and the other pages of the section, are gathered on the restaurant hub.