RRosterly

The Dutch working-hours rules, in plain language

The Arbeidstijdenwet (Working Hours Act) sets the legal frame for everyone who employs people in the Netherlands. Here is the version that matters to a horeca or retail owner — no legalese. This page explains the rules; always confirm details that affect your own staff with your payroll bureau or a specialist.

The numbers that bind every roster

Rule	Limit
Work per shift	Maximum 12 hours (article 5:7)
Work per week	Maximum 60 hours in a single week
Average over 4 weeks	Maximum 55 hours per week on average
Rest between shifts	Minimum 11 hours (once a week reducible to 8)
Breaks	30 minutes after 5.5 hours, 45 minutes after 10 hours
Sundays	At least 4 free Sundays per 13-week period
Minors (16–17)	Max 9 hours per day, 45 per week, no work 23:00–07:00

These are the statutory floors. Your collective agreement (CAO) may add stricter or different rules — the CAO always sits on top. Rosterly checks these statutory rules automatically and shows them as plain-language warnings on the roster: the 12-hour day, the weekly caps, the rest between shifts, the free Sundays and the rules for minors. The week is checked again before it goes out to anybody, and a finding stops it unless a planner overrides it and says why. One row in the table above is not checked yet, and we would rather say so than let you find out: breaks. A shift type records the length of its break so the hours and the wage are right, but the product does not yet check that the break the law requires was actually given. Rosterly does not replace a payroll specialist.

Where hand-made rosters break the law silently

The classic failure is the same every time: a long day nobody noticed (two shifts that add up to 14 hours), a minor put on a closing shift, a rest period of nine hours instead of eleven. These are not sabotage — they are what happens when a person stares at a grid at 23:00. Software that checks every rule on every save is the difference between a warning today and a fine after an inspection.

Open the demo — the checks run as you plan