Holiday hours and staffing plan template: one page per holiday

Holidays go wrong in small, predictable ways. The door sign says you close at 2 pm, but Google still shows 7 pm. Two baristas asked for the same Friday off and both got it. Nobody wrote down that last year's day before Thanksgiving was the busiest day of November, so this year it gets a normal Wednesday crew.

Our holiday and event staffing guide explains the approach: list the dates early, estimate each day, block time off, publish early and plan overtime on purpose. This post is the planner: one page you fill in for each holiday, so every decision for that day lives in one place, and next year you start from last year's sheet instead of from memory.

This is general information, not legal advice. Check your state and city rules on overtime, holiday pay and schedule notice.

How to use it

• One page per holiday, not one page for the season. Thanksgiving, the day before it and the Friday after are three different days with three different crews, so they're three rows on the same page.
• Start six weeks out. That's early enough to block time off before people make plans, and to post your hours before customers ask.
• Keep it with last year's page. The most useful number on this sheet is what happened last year on the same day.
• One owner. The manager who fills it in also ticks off the posting checklist. A plan with two owners has none.

The planner

Holiday ________ Location ________ Filled in by ________ Date ________

1. The days

Write last year's sales from your POS for the same position relative to the holiday (the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, not the same calendar date). If last year was your first year, use the nearest comparable day and write "estimate" next to it.

2. The staff you need

Turn each day's estimate into people per daypart. Use your own sales-per-labor-hour number, or the crew you'd put on a normal day with the same sales.

3. The deadlines

If your city has a fair workweek law, it can set your posting deadline for you. Seattle's Secure Scheduling Ordinance, for example, covers larger food service companies; our Seattle pay rules page (coming Oct 26) has the details.

4. Where your hours are posted

Change them everywhere on the same day, and tick each place off.

Our guides to the Google Business Profile and to Apple Maps, Yelp and Bing listings show where special hours go on each.

5. Pay and overtime notes

6. The look back

Fill this in the day after, while you remember.

A worked example

Hypothetical numbers for a small café, Thanksgiving week:

Three decisions follow from the page:

• Wednesday is the day that needs planning, not Thursday. Block time off on Wednesday first.
• Thursday is short and small, so it's a good day to offer voluntary shifts first. Ask who wants it before you assign it.
• The shift lead working Wednesday all day is probably the person heading into overtime. Check that before you publish, not after.

What the federal rules say

Federal law doesn't make a holiday special. The Fair Labor Standards Act regulations say: "The Act does not generally require, however, that an employee be paid overtime compensation for hours in excess of eight per day, or for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays or regular days of rest" (29 CFR 778.102). The same section notes that this doesn't relieve an employer of obligations it "may have assumed by contract or of any obligation imposed by other Federal or State law".

Overtime is counted per workweek: "An employee's workweek is a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours—seven consecutive 24-hour periods", and "Once the beginning time of an employee's workweek is established, it remains fixed regardless of the schedule of hours worked by him" (29 CFR 778.105). A holiday doesn't move your workweek, so a short Thursday and a long Wednesday land in the same week.

Holiday pay is your policy. Write it in your employee handbook, and check your state, which may count daily overtime or have its own rules.

Where Mays fits

• The holiday on the schedule. In Week view, the + in a day's Events row adds an event, with a note for the team ("Close at noon, short menu"). Staff with a published shift that day get a morning reminder with the note, unless you turn off Notify that day's scheduled staff in the location's Scheduling settings. See Schedule events and birthdays.
• Time off blocked. Scheduling → Time Off → Blocked Days adds a date and a title, such as "Day before Thanksgiving", for one location or, for an org admin, all of them. Employees can't request a blocked day off in the app. See Time off requests.
• Your estimate, not the average. With Square or Union connected, Scheduling → Forecast projects each day from the same weekday in recent weeks. It doesn't know about holidays, so click the holiday's projection and type the estimate from your planner. See Sales forecast and labor budget.
• Open shifts and overtime. Add extra shifts as Open shift (unassigned); when you publish, staff hear that open shifts are available to claim. The OT warnings card names who is heading into overtime that week, and Scheduling → Reports → Weekly Overtime shows the projected hours and cost per person.
• The look back. Scheduling → Reports → Actuals shows projected and actual sales, actual labor and Labor % per day, with Export CSV, for section 6.

What Mays doesn't do: there's no screen for a location's opening hours or holiday hours, and Mays doesn't change your hours on Google, so the posting checklist stays on paper. It doesn't calculate a holiday premium either; add it in payroll.

One page, every holiday

Fill in the page six weeks out, post your hours everywhere on the same day, and write the look back the day after. Next year, the planning starts from a page with real numbers on it.

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