Minimum Rest Between Shifts: The Clopening Rules by State, City, and Industry

There is no general federal law that sets a minimum number of hours between a closing shift and the next morning's opening shift, the turnaround schedulers call a clopening. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets the federal standards for minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping and youth employment. It has nothing to say about how little recovery time a worker gets between two shifts, no matter how short the gap.

OSHA doesn't fill that gap either, at least not with a number. Its own guidance on worker fatigue is blunt about the stakes: decreased alertness from fatigue was a factor in the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion and the 2009 Colgan Air crash, and almost 15 million Americans work full time on evening, night, rotating or other irregular shifts. But what OSHA points employers toward is education, training and fatigue management programs, not a fixed hours rule enforceable the way an overtime violation is.

So the floor, where one exists, comes from three narrower places: one state and a handful of cities and counties that regulate the schedule directly, a set of federal safety rules for specific occupations, and state limits on mandatory overtime in health care. Here is what each actually requires, and what to do in the much larger stretch of the country where none of them apply.

What does the law require in the states and cities that regulate this directly?

Oregon is the clearest example, because its rule is written as a number. Under Oregon's predictive scheduling law, an employer can't schedule or require an employee to work during the first 10 hours after the end of the previous calendar day's work or on-call shift, unless the employee asks for or agrees to those hours. That consent is what makes a clopening possible at all, but it doesn't waive the pay: the employer owes time and a half for each hour or portion of an hour worked inside the 10-hour window.

Nine local laws use the same basic structure: New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Emeryville, Berkeley, Los Angeles, unincorporated Los Angeles County, and Evanston. Each sets its own number between 9 and 11 hours, and each pairs it with the mechanism Oregon uses: the employee can agree to work inside the window, and the employer pays a premium when they do. The premium is where they differ most. Most use time and a half. Chicago's Fair Workweek notice sets 1.25 times the regular rate, New York City requires written consent and a flat $100 per clopening, and Philadelphia requires consent and $40. Los Angeles applies the premium more broadly: the city's Fair Work Week rules require written consent and time and a half for the entire second shift, not just the hours inside the window, and the county's ordinance does the same.

Coverage matters as much as the number. These laws reach large employers in specific industries, not every business in town. New York City's rule covers fast food workers only. Oregon and Seattle start at 500 employees worldwide, Los Angeles at 300 and Chicago at 100, while Emeryville and Berkeley reach down to 56. An independent cafe with a dozen staff in Seattle isn't covered, even though a chain coffee shop across the street may be.

We cover the full jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction breakdown, including the advance-notice windows and predictability pay that come bundled with the same laws, in our guide to fair workweek and predictive scheduling laws. It's worth being direct about the overlap: the rest rules in this post come from the same fair workweek laws, just answering a different question a manager might ask.

Three of these are recent. Berkeley's and Evanston's took effect in January 2024, and Los Angeles County's took effect on July 1, 2025, for retailers in the unincorporated parts of the county. Outside these ten jurisdictions, we found no other state or local law that sets a general rest period between shifts as of October 2026. San Francisco is the notable absence: its Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinances require two weeks' notice of schedules and predictability pay for late changes, but have no rest-between-shifts rule.

Do federal safety rules require rest between shifts in specific industries?

Two occupations have a hard federal floor, and both exist for the same reason: a fatigued person in that job is a public safety risk, not just a productivity one.

Truck drivers operate under 49 CFR 395.3(a)(1), which is about as direct as a regulation gets: "A driver may not drive without first taking 10 consecutive hours off duty." That rule covers drivers of property-carrying commercial vehicles, and once a driver comes on duty after that break, the driving has to stop when 14 consecutive hours have passed. Drivers with a sleeper berth can split the 10 hours into two periods, but under 49 CFR 395.1(g) one of them has to be at least 7 consecutive hours in the berth, neither can be shorter than 2 hours, and together they have to add up to at least 10.

Passenger airline pilots work under 14 CFR 117.25(e), which requires "a rest period of at least 10 consecutive hours immediately before beginning the reserve or flight duty period," and that rest period "must provide the flightcrew member with a minimum of 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep opportunity." It's the same number the trucking rule uses, which is a reasonable hint that 10 hours works as a practical floor for safety-sensitive fatigue, not just a round number.

In health care, the rules we checked limit mandatory overtime rather than setting a rest floor, though Washington's comes close to doing both. Its law says no employee of a health care facility may be required to work overtime (RCW 49.28.140), and it defines overtime as hours beyond a predetermined, regularly scheduled shift of no more than 12 hours in a 24-hour period or 80 hours in 14 days (RCW 49.28.130). The protection covers hourly or unionized staff in direct patient care or clinical services, not only nurses. There are exceptions, including unforeseeable emergencies and cases where the employer documents "reasonable efforts" to find coverage: asking working staff for volunteers, contacting staff who've said they're available, and looking for per diem and agency staff where that's permitted. And the statute does include a direct rest rule: an employee who accepts overtime and works more than 12 consecutive hours "shall be provided the option to have at least eight consecutive hours of uninterrupted time off from work following the time worked."

NIOSH's training materials for nurses make the underlying reason explicit: "Inadequate time off between work shifts prevents nursing staff from getting the 7 to 8 hours of sleep each day that most people need." Washington isn't the only state that limits mandatory overtime for nurses. New York's Labor Law section 167 bars a health care employer from requiring a nurse to work beyond regularly scheduled hours, outside a short list of emergencies and procedures already underway. The mechanics vary enough by state that it's worth checking your own state's rules rather than assuming the Washington version travels. We go deeper on this specific problem, including how mandatory overtime gets used to cover staffing gaps, in our guide to mandatory overtime in nursing.

How do these rules actually get enforced?

Nobody from a labor agency is reviewing your schedule before you publish it. For the fair workweek laws and Washington's health care rule, the route the agencies point workers to is a complaint. Oregon's BOLI page tells workers who think their employer is violating the scheduling law that they can make a complaint, and RCW 49.28.150 directs Washington's Department of Labor and Industries to investigate complaints of violations of the overtime rule.

That has a specific operational consequence, and it's the one that should actually change how a manager treats this. A scheduling practice that quietly breaks one of these rules can run for months without any consequence, right up until an employee who worked a string of short turnarounds files a claim covering all of them at once. The exposure doesn't show up gradually. It shows up all at once, backdated, and if it lands as someone is leaving, it lands when goodwill is at its lowest. That's the real argument for tracking every clopening exception as it happens, in writing, rather than trying to reconstruct who agreed to what six months later from memory.

What should a manager do when no law requires rest between shifts?

For the large majority of jobs, in the large majority of states, clopening is legal. That's not a loophole. It's just a place the law hasn't gone. The reasons behind the trucking and aviation rules don't stop at commercial drivers and pilots, though, and neither does the plain math of how little sleep a closing-to-opening turnaround leaves.

Work the numbers on an ordinary case. A retail or restaurant closing shift that wraps at 11:00 p.m., with a manager out the door by 11:30 after the close-out, and an opening shift that starts at 6:00 a.m., leaves 6.5 hours between clock-out and clock-in. Subtract a commute in both directions and the time it takes to actually fall asleep, and the NIOSH benchmark of 7 to 8 hours of sleep is already out of reach before anything else goes wrong that night. That's the arithmetic behind a fatigued opening shift. For most employers it breaks no law, but it still has a real operational cost: more mistakes on tasks that need attention, a slower open, and eventually a manager who burns out on being the fallback for every gap in the schedule.

I've seen managers get caught by exactly this: a schedule that quietly turned into a clopening rotation until someone flagged it. It's often an employee who does the flagging, not the manager, and that's a big reminder to stay on top of your own compliance rather than risk being reported by your own team.

The operational rule worth setting, whether or not your jurisdiction requires it: treat 10 hours as the default floor between a closing shift and an opening shift for the same employee, full stop. Ten hours isn't an arbitrary number to reach for. It's the number both federal rules above use for jobs where fatigue is a safety issue, it's the most common figure among the ten laws in the table, and there's no reason to assume the physiology is different for a shift lead than for a truck driver.

How should a schedule handle a clopening request or exception?

Clopening came up as a case worth designing around when we built Shift Amp. We wanted scheduling to be simple for small businesses, and part of that is keeping up with the rules and compliance issues that are easy for a manager or owner to not know about. Break rules are one example: Shift Amp applies them to shifts automatically, with reminders on the floor. Rest between shifts is the same kind of easy-to-miss rule, and the process below is how to keep it from slipping, whatever tool you use.

A blanket floor still needs an exception process, because the alternative to clopening is sometimes an uncovered shift, and that's a worse outcome for everyone, including the customer standing at a locked door at 6:01 a.m. A few things make the exception defensible instead of just informal.

Get it in writing, even where the law doesn't ask for it. New York City, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Berkeley and Evanston already require written consent for a short turnaround. Everywhere else, a saved text or a scheduling-app confirmation from the employee saying they're fine with it is a simple record, and it matters if a wage claim or a workers' comp question ever comes up later.

Watch the last-minute changes. In my experience, it's often the last-minute scheduling changes that lead to issues: asking someone to work a double to fill a call-out, or someone swapping their shift with a coworker who will now need overtime pay. A schedule that respected every rule on the day it was published can break one with a single text, so run every call-out fix and swap through the same check as the original schedule: the gap since that person's last shift, and their hours for the week. A swap that pushes someone past 40 hours in the workweek means overtime pay for non-exempt staff, whether or not your city has a rest rule.

Track every short turnaround separately from an ordinary swap. In a fair workweek jurisdiction, that record is what the premium is calculated from. Outside those jurisdictions, it's still the only way to notice that one person is absorbing every short-turnaround shift on the team, which is its own retention problem.

Don't let it become the default fallback for an open shift. If the same employee is the one who always says yes, the schedule isn't handling an occasional exception anymore. It's built around one person's fatigue as a standing feature of the rotation.

None of this requires new software or a compliance department. It requires writing the 10-hour floor down as a rule before the first time someone asks for an exception to it, rather than deciding case by case under time pressure on a Tuesday afternoon.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Rest rules, premiums and coverage thresholds differ by jurisdiction and change over time, so check the current ordinance or talk to an employment attorney before you build a rotation around them.