Fair Workweek Predictability Pay, Explained

Disclaimer: Informational only, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Local ordinances change and coverage depends on industry and employer size; check current city or state guidance or consult a professional.

The schedule went up two weeks ago. On Thursday night a manager texts that Saturday is cancelled, and there goes eight hours of rent money.

In most of the country that is legal and costs the employer nothing. In eleven jurisdictions the law puts a price on it, usually a premium paid on top of whatever you actually earned that week. The catch is that almost every guide on the internet quotes the same three numbers (14 days, one hour, half rate) and those numbers are wrong in more places than they are right.

Here is what the ordinances themselves say, and what a real schedule change actually pays out.

What Predictability Pay Actually Is

Predictability pay is a penalty premium. The employer posted a schedule, then changed it inside the notice window, and the ordinance makes it pay for the disruption whether or not you lost a single hour of work.

That is a different animal from reporting time pay, and the two get mixed up constantly. Reporting time pay is triggered by your body: you showed up and got sent home. Predictability pay does not care whether you showed up at all, only that the schedule changed after it was posted.

	Reporting time pay	Predictability pay
Trigger	You reported for a shift and got little or no work	The posted schedule changed inside the notice window
Geography	State law: 7 states plus DC	Local ordinance: Oregon statewide plus 10 cities and counties
Do you have to show up?	Yes, that is the whole trigger	No
Formula	A minimum number of hours for the day	A premium on top of wages earned

They stack. A retail worker in the City of Los Angeles who drives in and gets cut two hours early can collect California reporting time pay for the day and a predictability premium for the change, from two different bodies of law. Our guide to reporting time pay and show-up pay covers the state side in full.

Keep one more thing straight. Predictability pay is not pay for hours worked. Nobody worked the cancelled shift. That single fact drives the overtime treatment further down, and it is also why the premium behaves nothing like the hours in what counts as hours worked.

Who Is Covered: One State and Ten Local Jurisdictions

Start here, because most hourly workers in the US fail this test and deserve to find that out in thirty seconds.

Oregon is the only state with a predictive scheduling law. Ten local jurisdictions have their own: New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Emeryville, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Chicago, Evanston, the City of Los Angeles, and unincorporated Los Angeles County.

Every one of them applies three gates, and you have to clear all three:

Industry. Retail, food service and hospitality are the common core. Chicago adds healthcare, hotels, manufacturing, building services and warehousing. Evanston also covers childcare. If you work in an office, a warehouse in Seattle, or a hospital in Philadelphia, you are almost certainly outside the law.
Employer size. Usually a global headcount, and usually large. Oregon starts at 500 employees worldwide. Seattle at 500. Philadelphia at 250 employees and 30 locations. Chicago at 100 employees globally plus 50 covered employees. Franchises are typically counted as part of the whole brand, so a 12-person store in a 400-store chain is covered.
Where you work. These are place-of-work rules, not residence rules. Los Angeles city and county both require you to work at least two hours a week inside the boundary. Living in Evanston and working in Skokie gets you nothing.

Chicago adds a fourth gate that catches people by surprise: an earnings ceiling. You are only a covered employee if you earn no more than $33.85 an hour or $64,945.55 a year, the figures chicago.gov shows as of August 2026. Chicago reindexes those every July 1, so check the current number before you count yourself out.

And if your state has nothing, that may not be an accident. A number of states have passed preemption laws forbidding their own cities from enacting scheduling ordinances, and published counts of which states differ. “My state doesn’t have one” often means “my state made one illegal.”

The Numbers, Jurisdiction by Jurisdiction

This is where the generic summary falls apart. Notice windows are mostly 14 days, but the money is not mostly one hour.

Jurisdiction	Notice	Late change, no lost hours	Cut or cancelled shift	Rest gap and premium
Oregon (statewide)	14 days	1 hour at regular rate	0.5 times regular rate per scheduled hour not worked	10 hours; 1.5 times rate inside the gap
NYC fast food	14 days (336 hours)	Flat $10 under 14 days, $15 under 7 days, $15 under 24 hours	Flat $20 under 14 days, $45 under 7 days, $75 under 24 hours	11 hours; flat $100 per clopening
NYC retail	72 hours	No premium: adding time inside 72 hours is prohibited without written consent	No premium: cancelling inside 72 hours is prohibited, and on-call scheduling is banned outright	No rest-gap provision
Seattle	14 days	1 hour of pay	Half the hours not worked	10 hours; time and a half inside the gap
San Francisco	Two weeks	1 hour if under 7 days but 24 hours or more. Under 24 hours: 2 hours of pay for a shift of 4 hours or less, 4 hours of pay for a longer shift	Same tiered schedule, including reductions and cancellations	None: the ordinance has no clopening rule
Philadelphia	14 days	1 hour at regular rate (includes a change of location)	No less than 0.5 times regular rate per scheduled hour not worked	9 hours; flat $40 per shift
Chicago	14 days	1 hour of predictability pay, including for hours cut with more than 24 hours’ notice	Under 24 hours’ notice: no less than 50% of the pay for the cancelled or reduced hours, up to the whole shift	10 hours; 1.25 times base rate
Evanston	14 days	1 hour per shift under 14 days	Under 24 hours: 4 hours of pay, or the hours in the scheduled shift, whichever is less	11 hours; 1.5 times regular rate
Los Angeles city	14 days	1 hour per change to date, time or location	Hours not worked at 0.5 times regular rate	10 hours; time and a half for the second shift
LA County (unincorporated)	14 days	1 additional hour of pay	0.5 times regular rate for scheduled time not worked	10 hours; time and a half
Berkeley	Two weeks	1 hour if under 14 days	Under 24 hours: 4 hours of pay, or the hours reduced, whichever is less	11 hours; time and a half inside the gap
Emeryville	Covered for retail and fast food. Check the ordinance text for current figures	See ordinance	See ordinance	See ordinance

Three specific ways the “14 days, one hour, half rate” summary fails:

New York City fast food pays flat dollars, not hours. The premium has no relationship to your hourly rate. A shift cancelled inside 24 hours is $75 whether you earn $16 or $34 an hour. Note how the tiers are measured: the clock runs to the first day on the work schedule, not to the shift being changed, so any change made once the schedule week has started falls in the bottom tier. The same FAQ makes clear an employer owes a premium for each separate change to the same shift, so two changes to one Saturday are two premiums.

New York City retail has no premium at all. Instead of pricing the conduct, the law bans it. Seventy-two hours’ notice, no cancellations inside that window, no on-call shifts, and no “call in an hour before to see if we need you.” There is nothing to compute, which is why guides that assume a formula get this jurisdiction wrong.

Under 24 hours’ notice, San Francisco, Berkeley and Evanston pay in blocks of hours, not the single hour everyone quotes. San Francisco pays 2 hours for a short shift and 4 for anything over 4 hours. Berkeley and Evanston pay 4 hours, or the hours actually lost, whichever is smaller. Berkeley’s own FAQ works the example: a 15-minute cut with under 24 hours’ notice pays 15 minutes, not 4 hours.

Effective dates matter too, because older commentary is still circulating. Oregon’s notice window was 7 days from July 2018 and only widened to 14 days on July 1, 2020. Evanston’s ordinance took effect January 1, 2024 and its employer threshold was amended up from 15 to 100 employees. LA County’s rule is the newest, effective July 1, 2025.

Three Schedule Changes, Priced Out

Nobody on page one of Google computes a single dollar figure, so here are three at a plain $20 an hour.

Chicago: your Saturday shift gets moved to Monday, same hours, five days out. The move lands after the schedule was posted and inside Chicago’s 14-day window, so the change itself owes a premium even though you lost nothing. One hour of predictability pay: $20, plus the ordinary wages for the shift you worked on Monday.

Regular hours   8.00 hrs x $20.00 = $160.00
Predictability pay             1 hr = $ 20.00
Total                                $180.00

Oregon: an 8-hour shift is cancelled with six days’ notice. Six days is inside the 14-day window, so the cancellation pays half your regular rate for every scheduled hour you did not work. That is 0.5 x $20 x 8 = $80, and zero wages for the shift, because you did not work it.

New York City fast food: a 6-hour shift is cancelled 12 hours out. Flat $75. Notice what that does to the math. The half-rate formula everyone quotes would have produced $60, so the flat premium pays you more. But run the same cancellation for a shift lead earning $30 an hour and the half-rate formula would have given $90, while the ordinance still pays $75. Flat dollars help the lowest earners and cost the highest ones.

Each of these should land on the stub as its own earnings line, separate from hours times rate, in the same way a shift differential rides alongside base wages. If you cannot find it, how to read a pay stub shows where earnings codes live. For turning any of these gross figures into what actually hits your account, the calculators will run the withholding.

Does the Premium Count Toward Overtime?

This is the question no competing article answers, and the folk answer (“it never counts”) is too strong.

Under the Labor Department’s regular-rate rules, predictability pay and clopening premiums are generally excluded from the regular rate used to compute your overtime. 29 CFR 778.222 names them directly: subsection (d) covers predictability pay mandated by state or local law when you do not get the required notice, and subsection (c) covers pay mandated for working a shift that starts too soon after the last one ended. So a $20 premium in a 45-hour week does not raise your time-and-a-half rate.

There are two real limits on that.

Prearrangement. The same regulation says payments that are prearranged may not be excluded. The test the Department settled on is not how often the premium turns up but whether the extra work was anticipated and could reasonably have been scheduled. Its own example is a restaurant that anticipates needing extra servers for two hours during the busiest part of every Saturday evening and calls people in instead of scheduling more staff. That is prearrangement, and the money goes back into the regular rate. Regularity on its own does not settle the question, and the Department said so explicitly when it declined to keep the blunter version of this example from the proposed rule.

On-call pay is different. 29 CFR 778.223 treats on-call pay as compensation for performing a duty of the job, which means it is not excludable, and the Department applied that to on-call pay mandated by state and local scheduling laws too. A predictability premium is generally out of the regular rate; a mandated on-call payment generally is not.

Both provisions come from the DOL final rule on the regular rate, 84 FR 68736, published December 16, 2019 and effective January 15, 2020.

The premium is still fully taxable either way. Federal withholding, state withholding, Social Security and Medicare all apply, because it is wages paid to an employee. It just does not move the overtime needle. If you want the hours side of the picture, overtime laws by state covers the daily and weekly thresholds, and how to calculate overtime pay walks through what the regular rate actually is.

Clopenings and the Rest Gap

A clopening is closing at midnight and opening at six. Most fair workweek laws attach a minimum rest gap to it, and the gap is not the same everywhere.

Philadelphia sets it at 9 hours. Oregon, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles city and LA County use 10, while New York City fast food, Berkeley and Evanston use 11. San Francisco has no rest-gap rule at all.

The premium varies just as much. Time and a half in Oregon, Seattle, both Los Angeles jurisdictions, Berkeley and Evanston. Chicago pays 1.25 times your base rate. Philadelphia is a flat $40 for the shift, and New York City fast food a flat $100.

The more valuable half of the rule is usually the part nobody mentions: you can decline. In every jurisdiction with a rest-gap provision, a shift that starts inside the gap requires your consent, in writing in most places, and refusing it is protected. The premium exists to price the ask, not to obligate you to say yes. Minimum-rest rules get complicated enough to deserve their own article; this is the short version.

What to Do If You Think You Are Owed It

Predictability pay is won on one comparison: what the posted schedule said, against what actually happened. If you cannot show both, the claim usually dies.

Capture these on the day:

A screenshot of the posted schedule, with the date it was posted if the app shows it.
The change itself: the text, the app notification, or a note with the time and who told you.
What you actually worked, to the minute, kept independently of the employer’s system.
The pay stub for that period, showing whether a separate premium line appeared.

Then ask payroll. A surprising share of these are software configuration failures rather than decisions, and a plain question fixes it in one cycle.

If that goes nowhere, the agency route differs by city. Chicago runs enforcement through the Office of Labor Standards (or 311). New York City goes through the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Philadelphia has an Office of Worker Protections, Seattle an Office of Labor Standards, and Oregon uses BOLI. Los Angeles has an extra step worth knowing: you must give the employer written notice of the violation and a 15-day window to cure it before filing with the Office of Wage Standards, and the city can assess up to $50 a day on top of what you are owed. Retaliation for asking is prohibited in every one of these jurisdictions.

The compliance gap is real, and it is largest exactly where you would expect. A 2025 Washington Center for Equitable Growth factsheet, drawing on a 2024 survey of 1,781 retail and food-service workers in Chicago, Seattle and New York, found that only about a third of workers at covered worksites were partially compensated after being asked or required to leave before their scheduled end time, no better than workers at uncovered sites. Managers interviewed for the same research described the early cut as something they present to the worker as a voluntary choice, which is exactly how the premium disappears.

This is the kind of record ClockWage44 is built to keep. You log the shift as it was posted and the shift as you actually worked it, across as many jobs as you have, and the paycheck engine resolves federal tax, state tax, FICA, overtime and deductions into a take-home figure to the cent, on your device. When payroll or a labor agency asks what changed, you export the week instead of reconstructing it from memory.

References

Oregon BOLI: Predictive Scheduling. The state agency’s worker-facing page on the 14-day notice window and the half-rate cancellation premium.
NYC DCWP: Fair Workweek Law in Fast Food FAQ. Source of the flat-dollar schedule change premium table.
NYC DCWP: Fair Workweek Law in Retail FAQ. The 72-hour rule and the on-call scheduling ban.
Philadelphia Code Chapter 9-4600. Full ordinance text, including the 9-hour rest gap and the flat $40 premium.
Chicago Office of Labor Standards: Fair Workweek. Covered industries, employer thresholds, and the annually indexed wage ceiling.
29 CFR 778.222 (Cornell LII). The federal regulation naming predictability pay as excludable from the FLSA regular rate.
DOL final rule, Regular Rate Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 84 FR 68736. The prearrangement caveat and the on-call carve-out.
Lambert and Henly, Washington Center for Equitable Growth (2025). Survey evidence on how often covered workers are actually paid the premium.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which states and cities have predictive scheduling laws?

Oregon is the only state. Ten local jurisdictions also have one: New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Emeryville, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Chicago, Evanston, the City of Los Angeles, and unincorporated Los Angeles County. Several states have gone the other way and passed laws barring their own cities from enacting scheduling ordinances at all.

How much is predictability pay when my shift is cancelled?

In most covered jurisdictions (Oregon, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, and both Los Angeles jurisdictions) it is half your regular rate for every scheduled hour you do not work. Chicago is the one to read closely: its 50 percent rule applies when the cancellation lands with less than 24 hours' notice, and a cancellation made earlier than that but inside the 14-day window pays one hour instead. San Francisco, Berkeley and Evanston instead pay a block of 2 to 4 hours when the notice is under 24 hours. New York City fast food pays flat dollars: $20, $45 or $75 depending on how late the cancellation came.

What is the difference between predictability pay and reporting time pay?

Reporting time pay is a state rule that kicks in when you physically show up and are sent home with little or no work. It puts a floor under the day. Predictability pay is a local ordinance premium that kicks in when the employer changes a schedule it had already posted, whether or not you ever showed up. In a covered city you can be owed both on the same day.

Can my employer change my schedule without telling me?

Outside the eleven covered jurisdictions, generally yes. No federal law requires advance notice of a work schedule. Inside them, the employer must post the schedule 14 days ahead (72 hours in New York City retail) and owes a premium, and usually needs your written consent, for changes made after that.

Can I refuse a clopening shift?

In every jurisdiction with a rest-gap rule, yes. You can decline a shift that starts inside the gap (9 hours in Philadelphia, 10 in Oregon, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles, 11 in New York City fast food, Berkeley and Evanston) without being penalized. If you agree in writing, you are owed the premium: time and a half in most places, 1.25 times base rate in Chicago, a flat $40 per shift in Philadelphia and a flat $100 in New York City fast food.

Does predictability pay count toward overtime?

Generally no. The Labor Department's regular-rate regulations name predictability pay and clopening pay mandated by state or local law as payments that can be excluded from the regular rate used to figure overtime. There are two limits: if the payments are so routine they are effectively prearranged, they go back in, and pay you receive simply for being on call is not excluded at all.

Do I still get predictability pay if I agreed to the change?

Usually yes. New York City's rules are explicit that a worker cannot waive a schedule change premium and that written consent creates no exception. What does remove the premium almost everywhere is a change you initiated: asking for time off, swapping shifts with a coworker, or volunteering for extra hours.

Where does predictability pay show up on my pay stub?

It should appear as its own earnings line, separate from your hours, because it is paid on top of the wages you earned. If your stub shows only hours times rate after a late cancellation, that is the first sign the premium was skipped.