Your right to rest breaks at work, and what actually counts as one

If you’re going long stretches without a proper break, or your employer’s idea of a “rest break” is being told to eatStands for Employment Appeal Tribunal. It hears appeals from employment tribunal decisions on points of law, not on the facts. It is not a way of simply asking for a second opinion on the outcome. lunch at your desk in case a call comes in, you’re not imagining that something’s wrong. The law is specific about what a rest break actually has to look like, and being technically allowed a break isn’t the same as being given one.

What the law actually gives you

The Working Time Regulations 1998 set three separate rest entitlements, and it’s worth knowing all three because they cover different situations.

• A break during the working day. If you work more than 6 hours in a day, you’re entitled to an uninterrupted rest break of at least 20 minutes, taken during the working day rather than at the start or end of it.
• Daily rest. You’re entitled to at least 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24-hour period.
• Weekly rest. You’re entitled to at least 24 hours of rest in every 7-day period, or 48 hours in every 14-day period.

These are minimums, not targets. Your contract can give you more, but it can’t lawfully give you less, unless a genuine exception applies (certain sectors, like transport and the emergency services, have modified rules, and some workers can agree to different arrangements through a collective or workforce agreement).

What actually counts as a rest break

This is where most disputes start, because “you got a break” and “you got a rest break the law recognises” are not always the same thing.

The Court of Appeal set out what a genuine rest break requires in a case involving airline catering workers at Gatwick, whose job involved short bursts of intense activity between quieter periods (Gallagher v Alpha Catering Services Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 1559). The court held that a genuine rest break has to be uninterrupted, not chopped up by being on standby or interruptible. You should know it’s coming, not discover afterwards that a quiet 20 minutes happened to occur. And it has to be genuinely yours to use as you choose, not time when you’re still at your employer’s disposal, even if nothing actually happened to interrupt it.

The key point from this case: “downtime” doesn’t count just because it turns out, after the fact, to have lasted 20 minutes. If you were still expected to respond if something came up, it wasn’t a rest break under the law, even if nothing came up.

Can your employer split your break into shorter chunks?

Not automatically, but it isn’t ruled out either. A railway signaller challenged his employer’s practice of giving him several short breaks that added up to more than 20 minutes, rather than one continuous 20-minute block (Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd v Crawford [2019] EWCA Civ 269). The Court of Appeal held that whether several shorter breaks can genuinely stand in for one uninterrupted break is a question of fact for a tribunal to decide on the circumstances, not something that’s automatically fine or automatically unlawful.

In practice, this means the burden is on your employer to show the arrangement genuinely gives you equivalent rest, not just the same number of minutes on paper. A pattern of frequent short interruptions is a weaker case for the employer than, say, two genuinely separate 10-minute breaks that both meet the other Gallagher requirements.

If you can’t get an uninterrupted break: compensatory rest

Some jobs genuinely can’t guarantee an uninterrupted 20 minutes, most commonly where you’re the only person covering a site or task. The law accounts for this with compensatory restCompensatory rest is an equivalent rest break your employer must give you at another time, when your job genuinely doesn't allow you to take your normal uninterrupted rest break, for example if you're...: where your normal rest entitlement isn’t practically possible, your employer must give you an equivalent period of rest at another time instead of just letting the entitlement disappear.

A security guard on a single-manned site, unable to take an uninterrupted break because there was no one to cover for him, established the test for what compensatory rest has to look like (Hughes v Corps of Commissionaires Management Ltd [2011] EWCA Civ 1061). It still has to have the real characteristics of a break. At least 20 minutes. Genuinely restful, not just permitted. Being on call during it doesn’t automatically rule it out, but it has to be a real opportunity to rest, not an entitlement that exists on paper and never actually gets taken.

Being told you’re “on call” doesn’t mean you’re getting rest

This comes up most for workers who live where they work, such as resident managers, wardens, or live-in care staff, but the underlying principle applies to any on-call arrangement.

A resident manager at a retirement complex, on call for 24 hours over a 4-day pattern and provided with tied accommodation, was told by her employer that she could “take such rest as she could” during her working time (MacCartney v Oversley House Management [2006] ICR 510). The Employment Appeal Tribunal held that this didn’t satisfy the law. Being left to find your own moment to rest, whenever the job happens to allow it, is not the same as your employer positively giving you a genuine break. The tribunal treated the whole on-call period as working time. The duty to provide rest sat with the employer, not the workerA legal category that sits between employee and self-employed. Workers are entitled to certain rights including national minimum wage, paid holiday, and protection from unlawful deduction from wages, ....

If your employer’s approach to your rest entitlement amounts to “you’re welcome to rest whenever you get a moment,” that’s very unlikely to meet the legal standard, however reasonable it may sound on paper.

What to do if you’re not getting proper rest breaks

Start by working out which of the three entitlements above is actually the problem, since the fix looks different depending on whether it’s the daily 20-minute break, the 11-hour daily rest, or the weekly rest that’s being squeezed.

Keep a simple record for a couple of weeks. Note what breaks you were actually given, whether you were interrupted or on standby during them, and how much daily and weekly rest you actually got between shifts. These disputes usually come down to what actually happened, day to day, rather than what your contract or rota says on paper.

Raise it with your employer directly in the first instance, in writing if possible, so there’s a record that they were told. If nothing changes, this guide on raising a grievance sets out how to take it further formally. A serious, sustained breach of your rest entitlements can support a constructive dismissalWhen your employer's behaviour is so serious that you feel you have no choice but to resign, the law may treat that resignation as a dismissal. The most common basis is a fundamental breach of the imp... claim if you eventually resign because of it. These regulations are implied into every employment contract, which makes a long-running pattern like this a breach of contractWhen one party to an employment contract fails to comply with one of its terms without a lawful reason. Your employer breaching a significant term of your contract can entitle you to resign and claim ... in its own right.

Book a call if you want to talk through whether what you’re experiencing meets the legal test before you raise it.