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Eleven hours, and in one piece
After the end of the daily working time, employees have to have an uninterrupted rest period of at least eleven hours. "Uninterrupted" is to be taken literally: a single work call can interrupt the rest period and make it start again.
Practical consequence: anyone finishing at 20:00 may start again at 07:00 the following day at the earliest.
Where shortening is permitted
Section 5(2) ArbZG names exhaustively the areas in which the rest period may be shortened by up to one hour: hospitals and other institutions for the treatment, nursing and care of people, restaurants and other catering and accommodation establishments, transport operations, broadcasting, and agriculture and animal husbandry.
The shortening is tied to a condition: every shortening has to be balanced within one calendar month or within four weeks by extending another rest period to at least twelve hours.
On-call duty and stand-by duty
In working time law, on-call duty and stand-by duty are not the same thing. Stand-by duty counts as working time in full. On-call duty generally does not count as working time, but an actual call-out during on-call duty does.
For the rest period that means: a call-out during on-call duty interrupts it. Whether and how the rest period then starts running again depends on the individual case and is treated in a differentiated way in case law.
Why shift schedules come unstuck on this
The most common breach arises not from ill will but from the planning: late shift until 22:00, early shift from 06:00, eight hours of rest instead of eleven. In a spreadsheet nobody notices, because the two shifts sit in different rows.
The only reliable way to avoid this is for the planning to check the rest period when assigning, instead of assessing it after the fact.
This is not legal advice; for a specific case at your workplace you are better off asking someone qualified to give it.
Published by: AMNAU GmbH
Editorial responsibility: Ugur Aydogan, Product development.
Last reviewed: 12 August 2026