Are breaks paid or unpaid in Swiss hospitality?

Swiss employment law sets the minimums by the length of the working day.

Breaks should fall roughly in the middle of the working day rather than at the end. A break of 30 minutes or less cannot be split; longer breaks can be divided. For hospitality specifically, meal time does not count as working time and should be at least half an hour.

A break counts as working time when the employee may not leave their workplace. In practice, in a restaurant, that covers situations like a cook eating at the pass because they may be needed, or someone told to stay at the bar in case a guest arrives.

Two clarifications matter, because both come up constantly.

Staying voluntarily does not make a break paid. Someone who could have gone out and chose to eat in the staff area is still on an unpaid break, as long as they were genuinely free to leave and not expected to be available.

Very short interruptions are not breaks in the legal sense. Going to the toilet or grabbing a drink is working time, not a deductible break. Smoking breaks, on the other hand, are treated as breaks.

Almost never in the legal reading. Nearly always in what gets recorded.

The most common error is the automatic deduction. Thirty minutes is subtracted from every shift over seven hours, regardless of whether the break happened. On a quiet Tuesday it did. On a full Saturday the team ate standing up in four minutes and the deduction is simply wrong. Repeat that across a busy month and a member of staff has lost several hours of pay that they know they worked, which is exactly the sort of grievance that surfaces at the worst possible moment.

The second error is the break that exists only in the manager’s head. Nobody wrote down whether the hour on the schedule was paid or unpaid, so the employee assumes one thing and payroll assumes the other.

Both errors have the same fix, and it is not a policy. It is writing the break on the shift, marked paid or unpaid, and having the person who worked confirm what they actually took.

A shift from 09h00 to 19h00 with a one hour unpaid break is nine paid hours, not ten. Obvious in principle, and a recurring source of confusion in practice, because the shift is discussed as "nine to seven" and remembered by the employee as ten hours.

The clearest approach is to make the break visible on the shift itself, so that both sides see the same thing before the work happens rather than after.