Weekly Free Day (Fridøgn)

The Weekly Free Day constraint checks that an employee gets one long, unbroken rest within every rolling period of days. The EU Working Time Directive asks for 24 hours of weekly rest on top of the 11-hour daily rest — 35 hours in a row within each 7 days.

When to use

Use this constraint when:

• You must follow the weekly rest rule of the EU Working Time Directive (in Danish, fridøgn)
• An agreement sets a different weekly rest or a longer reference period
• You want breaches to show on the timesheet, not only in the work time compliance report

Parameters

How it works

The rule looks at rest periods, not calendar days. A rest period is the time between one check-out and the next check-in, measured from check in/out only.

For each day, mTime looks at the last Reference Period Days days up to and including that day, and finds the longest rest within them. If none reaches Minimum Rest Minutes , the window has no free day.

• A day off is not automatically a free day. A day off between a late finish and an early start can add up to less than 35 hours.
• A rest across midnight counts in full. Saturday 14:00 to Monday 07:00 is 41 hours of rest, even though no calendar day was entirely free of work.
• A rest is counted in the window where it ends. A long weekend that began before the window still counts at its full length.
• Each missed free day is reported once. The breach is placed on the first day whose window has no long enough rest. The following days, whose windows contain the same stretch of work, are not flagged again. If the employee then keeps working without a long rest for several more weeks, the timesheet still shows only that first breach — the compliance report lists every day.
• No check-in, no check. Employees who register hours without checking in and out are never flagged. A rest that began before the first check-in on record, or one that is still running (the employee has not checked in again yet), is not judged until it can be measured.
• Days after today are not checked.

What the employee sees

The day is marked on the timesheet, and the period overview shows a message such as No continuous rest of 35 hours within the last 7 days; the longest was 13 hours. Under Blocking constraints the timesheet cannot be submitted while the breach stands; under Non-blocking constraints it is a warning only. Checking in is never prevented.

The compliance report

The work time compliance report measures weekly rest for every employee who checks in and out, using the values configured here — or 35 hours within 7 days when no policy configures this constraint. If several policies applying to the same employee configure it, the report takes the longest rest and the shortest reference period among them.

Examples

EU directive: 35 hours within 7 days

1. Add the Weekly Free Day (Fridøgn) plugin under Non-blocking constraints
2. Set Minimum Rest Minutes to 2100
3. Set Reference Period Days to 7

An employee has the weekend off and checks in on Monday morning. From then on they work every day, including the next weekend, with about 12 hours between shifts. The window ending on Sunday still contains the rest that ended on the first Monday morning, so it passes. The window ending on the second Monday is the first without a 35-hour rest, so that Monday is flagged.

A bare 24 hours within 14 days

An agreement reads the obligation as 24 hours of rest within any two weeks:

1. Add the Weekly Free Day (Fridøgn) plugin
2. Set Minimum Rest Minutes to 1440
3. Set Reference Period Days to 14

Troubleshooting