Fair Workweek Premium Calculator for Hotels

Exactly five predictive-scheduling laws reach hotel operations — and none of them is the one most policy teams have heard of. This calculator answers the two questions in order: first, does any fair-workweek law cover this hotel and this employee at all; second, what do this week's schedule changes, late cancellations, and clopenings actually cost under the law that applies. Every threshold and premium comes from a verified law record, and inputs never leave your browser.

Step 1 — does any fair-workweek law reach this hotel?#

Step 2 — price the week's scheduling events#

The five laws that actually cover hotels#

• Chicago — hotels are one of the seven covered industries for employers with 100+ employees globally and 50+ covered employees. The rules were recalibrated effective June 1, 2026, and an employee is covered only at or below $33.85/hour or $64,945.55/year from July 1, 2026 — the ceilings move every July 1, so re-screen the roster each summer.
• Evanston — hospitality employers (including hotels) with 100+ employees worldwide; a single large hotel clears the bar more easily than under Chicago's dual test.
• Philadelphia — hospitality employers with 250+ employees AND 30+ locations worldwide; chains and franchises count, so one franchised flag downtown can be covered through its brand's portfolio.
• Oregon — the only statewide law: hotels, motels, and casino hotels at 500+ employees worldwide, in every Oregon city.
• Berkeley — 10+ employees in Berkeley and 56+ globally, operative January 12, 2024 and still missing from most hotel compliance checklists.

The famous laws that don't#

Just as important is the list a national policy team should not build premiums around. The five most-asked-about laws are on file as verified non-coverage records — screen a hotel in one of these cities above and the answer appears explicitly, with the reason and the citation:

• New York City — the Fair Workweek Law covers fast-food chains (30+ locations nationally) and retail employers with 20+ city employees only (N.Y.C. Admin. Code §20-1201 et seq.). A Manhattan hotel owes nothing under it.
• San Francisco — the Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinances cover chain "formula retail" establishments with 40+ retail sales establishments worldwide and 20+ San Francisco employees (Police Code arts. 33F–33G). A hotel is not formula retail — though a branded outlet operating inside one might be on its own.
• Seattle — Secure Scheduling covers retail and food-services establishments with 500+ employees worldwide (SMC ch. 14.22). Seattle reaches hotels through its separate 2019 Hotel Employee Protections package (SMC chs. 14.26–14.29) — which carries no scheduling premiums.
• Los Angeles — the Fair Work Week Ordinance covers retail businesses in NAICS sectors 44–45 with 300+ employees globally (LAMC §185.00 et seq.); hotels are NAICS 721 and answer instead to LA's separate hotel ordinances. LA County's unincorporated-area ordinance is retail-only as well.
• Emeryville — the Fair Workweek Ordinance covers retail and fast-food firms only (EMC ch. 5-39), even as Berkeley's hotel-covering ordinance applies two miles away.

A hotel in any of those cities owes no fair-workweek premium as a hotel — though a leased Starbucks or branded restaurant inside it may be covered on its own, because coverage follows the business, not the building. Writing 14-day notice plus premium entitlements into a national handbook converts non-obligations into contractual ones.

The premium taxonomy#

All five laws share the same skeleton — 14 days' posted notice and one hour of predictability pay for a change inside the window — and then diverge on cancellations and rest:

Clopening premiums everywhere apply only to shifts the employee agreed to work — in all five regimes the employee may decline a shift that starts inside the rest window, without retaliation.

From a schedule to the premium owed#

The hard part of fair-workweek compliance is not the arithmetic; it is the classification — deciding whether a given change even triggers a premium. The schedule-log mode does that work. Enter what happened in plain terms — a shift on this date, posted then, changed at this time, with the prior shift ending then — and the engine computes the notice given, decides whether a cancellation falls inside the law's sub-24-hour gate (Chicago, Evanston, Berkeley) or simply follows any post-posting subtraction (Philadelphia, Oregon), detects a clopening from the gap to the prior shift, and applies the de-minimis rule (15 minutes in Chicago, 20 in Philadelphia, 30 in Oregon) before charging anything. A single logged shift can yield two premiums — a schedule-change charge and a clopening — exactly as the ordinances stack them.

It also screens the statutory exceptions, the part most calculators ignore. Tag a change as an employee-initiated swap, a written request, an emergency, or a documented disciplinary cut, and the engine drops the premium and cites the exception that excuses it — Chicago's MCC §6-110-050(d), Philadelphia's §9-4603(2), Oregon's ORS 653.455(2), and their analogues — while Philadelphia's 24-hour post-posting grace is computed from the timestamps without any tag at all. Where a law's exception list could not be fully verified against the code text, the tool says so and prices the event rather than guessing it away.

A worked example — the night auditor's clopening#

Notice-and-posting checklist#

• Written good-faith estimate of expected days, hours, and shifts delivered at hire — and updated when the role changes.
• Schedules posted in writing at least 14 days ahead at every covered property, with each version retained.
• Every post-publication change coded as employee-initiated (swaps and pickups are premium-free everywhere), excepted, or premium-bearing — and the premium paid in the same pay period.
• Clopening conflicts flagged at schedule build; the employee's decline or written consent documented before the shift is worked.
• Premiums itemized on wage statements, and the official notice posters for Chicago, Evanston, Philadelphia, Oregon, and Berkeley displayed where covered employees can see them.

This tool prices one week's events under one law at a time. It now classifies events from timestamps and screens each law's verified statutory exceptions (employee swaps and written requests, emergencies and utility failures, just-cause discipline, ticketed-event and banquet changes, Oregon's standby list, Philadelphia's post-posting grace), but it does not model the access-to-hours offer rules or multi-week patterns, and it prices a single covered law rather than overlapping ones. Background and the exception map: fair workweek & schedule-driven premiums. To audit the same worker's wages, overtime, and ordinance premiums for the week, use the workweek auditor. This tool is educational and illustrative — see the disclaimer.