Restaurant and hospitality shift pay
Split shifts, midnight finishes, unpaid breaks and tips.
Hospitality pay has more moving parts than most sectors: variable rosters, premiums that differ by day, breaks that are rarely paid and tips governed by their own legislation. Keeping your own record is the single most useful habit.
Shifts that cross midnight
A shift from 22:00 to 06:00 is eight hours, recorded against the day it started. Payroll systems handle this fine; hand-written timesheets often do not. If you close, check that the hours after midnight appear on the payslip at all.
Breaks
Fifteen minutes after four and a half hours, thirty after six, and normally unpaid. Across a full-time hospitality year that is over €1,800 of time at the workplace that is not paid. It is lawful — but it should be in your mental arithmetic when a rate is quoted.
Sunday and public holidays
Sunday work must be compensated, with no statutory percentage: the comparator is the closest applicable collective agreement. Public holidays are different and more specific — you are entitled to one of a paid day off, an additional day of annual leave, an additional day's pay, or a paid day off within a month.
Split shifts
A lunch service and a dinner service with four unpaid hours between them commits your whole day for two shifts' pay. Nothing prohibits split shifts, but the daily rest entitlement of 11 consecutive hours still applies across the 24 hours.
Tips
The Payment of Wages (Amendment) (Tips and Gratuities) Act 2022 requires that electronic tips be distributed fairly and transparently, bans using tips to make up contractual wages, and requires a visible tips and gratuities notice. Tips cannot be counted towards the national minimum wage.
The minimum wage check
Minimum wage is measured against working hours as the law defines them, which generally exclude unpaid breaks. Divide your gross pay for a period by the hours you were actually paid for and compare with the rate for your age category.