Sharing staff between locations: scheduling, overtime and pay

This is part 3 of 7 in our series Running a multi-location restaurant group. Earlier: what changes for the owner and standardizing recipes, checklists and training.

With two stores, your people become shared. A barista covers a Saturday across town, a cook preps at one store in the morning and works the line at the other at night, a lead opens one store and closes the other. Sharing staff is one of the best things about having more than one location: more hours for the people who want them, cover for call-outs, and trained people instead of strangers.

It also brings two problems a one-store owner never has: two managers scheduling the same person, and hours that may have to be added up across stores.

This is general information, not legal advice. The federal regulations quoted here were checked on the eCFR on October 5, 2026.

Give everyone a home store

• One home store per person, and one manager there who owns their availability, time off, hours target, check-ins and pay.
• Borrowing goes through the managers. The borrowing manager asks the home manager first, then the employee, and the employee can say no.
• A deadline for requests, such as before the home store drafts next week's schedule, so nobody is borrowed after their week is already full.
• Labor cost stays where the work was done. A borrowed shift counts in the borrowing store's labor, so both stores' labor percentages are honest.
• Decide who carries the overtime premium before it happens. One simple rule: the store whose shift crosses 40 hours pays the premium.

Schedule the person, not two schedules

• One availability per person, seen by both managers.
• The home store schedules first, and the borrowing store fills in around it.
• Before you publish, check four things for everyone who works at both stores: their total hours for the week, the rest between a close at one store and an open at the other, the drive between stores (see below), and teen hour limits.

Teen limits count the whole week. For 14- and 15-year-olds, federal law allows work "Not more than 18 hours in any 1 week when school is in session" (29 CFR 570.35), and a week there is "identical to the workweek the employer establishes for the employee." If both stores are one employer, a teen's hours at both count toward one limit. States can set their own, stricter limits too.

One company: the hours add up

The federal rule is about the employer, not the store. Under 29 CFR 778.103:

"If in any workweek an employee is covered by the Act and is not exempt from its overtime pay requirements, the employer must total all the hours worked by the employee for him in that workweek (even though two or more unrelated job assignments may have been performed), and pay overtime compensation for each hour worked in excess of the maximum hours applicable under section 7(a) of the Act."

So if your stores are locations of one company, you must total each person's hours across all of them. Here's a hypothetical week for Luis, whose workweek runs Monday to Sunday:

Neither store's schedule shows more than 30 hours, but Luis worked 44 hours for one employer. Four of them are overtime.

Separate companies: it depends

Some owners set up a separate company for each location. Then the question is whether the companies are joint employers of the people who work at more than one store. The second sentence of the same section:

"In the case of an employee employed jointly by two or more employers (see part 791 of this chapter), all hours worked by the employee for such employers during the workweek must be totaled in determining the number of hours to be compensated in accordance with section 7(a)."

Who counts as a joint employer isn't spelled out in a current regulation. The Labor Department's joint-employment regulation, 29 CFR 791.2 in the version that stood from 1958 until it was replaced in 2020, said: "A determination of whether the employment by the employers is to be considered joint employment or separate and distinct employment for purposes of the act depends upon all the facts in the particular case." Among its examples of joint employment were an arrangement "to share the employee's services, as, for example, to interchange employees," and employers where one "controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with the other employer." The 2020 replacement was itself removed in 2021.

Since then, the question has been decided case by case. Common ownership, shared managers and shared scheduling are the usual factors. If your stores are separate companies and people work at more than one, ask an employment attorney whether their hours have to be totaled before you assume they don't.

Two pay rates in one week

If South pays $18 an hour and North pays $16, or someone works a second position at a higher rate, overtime isn't paid at whichever rate is lower. The regular rate "is determined by dividing his total remuneration for employment (except statutory exclusions) in any workweek by the total number of hours actually worked by him in that workweek" (29 CFR 778.109). For two kinds of work at two rates, "his regular rate for that week is the weighted average of such rates" (29 CFR 778.115).

Luis's week, with hypothetical rates:

The premium is half the regular rate because the straight-time pay already covers every hour once. Your payroll provider does this math; your job is to make sure both stores' hours reach the same paycheck calculation.

The drive between stores is work time

"Time spent by an employee in travel as part of his principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday, must be counted as hours worked." (29 CFR 785.38)

If Luis finishes at North at 2:00 and drives straight to South for a 2:30 start, the drive is work time. With a punch out at one store and a punch in at the other, it falls between the two punches and goes unpaid unless you add it. Pay it, and count it toward the 40 hours. Going home and coming in from home the next day is ordinary commuting, which this rule doesn't cover.

Decide, too, whether you reimburse mileage when people use their own car between stores, and write it down.

Stores in different cities or states

If your stores are in different cities or states, the minimum wage, overtime, break and scheduling rules can differ between them, and some states count overtime by the day as well as by the week. Check each one before you share people between them. Our state pages, such as California's and Florida's, list the rules for each state.

How Mays handles this

• One person, several stores. Add the stores to someone's Assigned Locations, and they can be on each store's schedule (Manage staff decides who has a row). Only admins can change an existing person's locations. See Location access for managers.
• Double-booking across stores. If someone has overlapping shifts at two stores, the shift is outlined in red with Overlaps and the warning names the other location. Mays warns and never blocks. See Building the weekly schedule.
• Hours across stores, in two places. The auto-scheduler's weekly hours limit counts shifts at every location, and Find cover shows each candidate's hours this week at every location.
• Punches at the right store. Each store's kiosk or NFC tag records the punch at that store. The phone's Clock in always uses the person's first location, so at the other store use its kiosk or tag. See Kiosk mode.
• Open shifts and trades stay inside a store. Only people assigned to a store can claim its open shifts or take a hand-off or swap there.
• Pay rates. Each person has one Hourly wage, which wins over position wages. Positions can belong to one store with their own default wage, but there's no way in the app to give one person a different wage at each store. See Positions and wages.

What Mays doesn't do yet: Mays counts overtime per location. For someone who works at two of your stores in the same week, the OT warnings on the schedule, the Weekly Overtime report, the pay period's Regular and OT split and the payroll export look at each store on its own and don't combine the two. Until that changes, total those people's hours by hand every week, and tell your payroll provider about any overtime the per-store figures don't show. Mays also has no travel time between stores: add the drive under Add punch in the pay period. See Timesheets and pay periods.

Your shared-staff checklist

• A home store and a home manager for every person
• Borrowing requests through the managers, before the home store drafts the week
• Everyone who works at two stores checked for total hours, rest, the drive and teen limits
• Hours totaled across stores if they're one company
• Separate companies checked with an employment attorney
• Blended rates and the drive between stores in payroll
• Each store's local rules checked before you share people

Share people without losing track of them

Put each person on every store they work at, see overlaps across stores, and record every punch at the store where it happens.

Start your free trial: 30 days, every module, no card needed. Or book a walkthrough and we'll set up your shared staff with you.