Breaks – automatic & compliant

The German Working Hours Act (ArbZG) prescribes minimum rest breaks for employees: if working time exceeds six hours, at least 30 minutes of rest must be taken; anyone working more than nine hours is entitled to at least 45 minutes. These statutory minimums are non-negotiable – they apply whether you work in the office, from home, or on a business trip.

For employees and freelancers who document their own working time, this means: breaks must be correctly recorded and deducted from the gross working time so that the reported net working time complies with the legal framework.

Zeitbro measures the duration of your working day and applies a configurable threshold logic. The ArbZG statutory minimums (30 min from 6 h, 45 min from 9 h) define the legal floor; Zeitbro's defaults follow the same direction but are independently configurable.

Here is how the automation works in its default configuration:

Not every working day looks the same – which is why all thresholds and break durations are individually configurable in Zeitbro's settings. You can freely set the long-break threshold (the point at which the longer break applies), the default break duration, and the long break duration.

Important: the statutory minimum breaks under the ArbZG are independent of these settings. Zeitbro's configurable values are convenience defaults for automatic calculation – they do not replace the obligation to actually comply with the legal minimums.

Manual break entries are easy to forget or estimate inaccurately. This leads to an incorrect net hours balance – either too much overtime is reported or the documentation does not reflect reality. Automatically calculated breaks solve this problem because they are consistent and traceable.

Zeitbro stores the deducted break value for each working day and displays it in the monthly overview. At a glance you can see whether your break practice meets the legal requirements – and you always have a clean basis for your records.