Weekend work in logistics: planning allowances and rest periods correctly

In logistics, work does not stop on Friday evening. An e-commerce peak, a vessel berthing on Sunday night, a customer expecting their pallets at 6 a.m. on Monday: for many warehouses and transport firms, weekend work is the rule rather than the exception. Legally, though, it is one of the most sensitive pieces of scheduling you will ever do. Saturday and Sunday fall under completely different rules, and the mistake is usually not in the shift itself but in the rest that has to follow it.

Below we set out the logic: what is allowed, which rest you are obliged to grant, where allowances come from, and how to turn all of that into a workable roster.

Saturday is not Sunday

The biggest mental error in weekend scheduling: treating "the weekend" as one single block. It is not.

• Saturday is an ordinary working day under Belgian employment law. There is no general legal ban and there is no general statutory allowance either. Whether you may schedule Saturday work — and under what conditions — depends on your work rules (arbeidsreglement), the published work schedules and your sector-level collective agreement.
• Sunday is the opposite. The Employment Act of 16 March 1971 prohibits Sunday work in principle, and then works with a long list of exceptions. For plenty of logistics activities — transport, loading and unloading, certain continuous or perishable processes — those exceptions do exist, but they are neither automatic nor unlimited.

The practical consequence: if you move a Saturday shift to Sunday, far more changes than one letter in your schedule. You end up in a different regime, with mandatory compensatory rest and a legally increased overtime premium as soon as actual overtime is involved.

Is your company allowed to work on Sunday?

That is never a gut-feeling question. Work through these three levels:

1. The Employment Act and its implementing decrees. Does your activity fall under one of the exceptions to Sunday rest? For dock work and terminal operations the answer looks different than for a classic distribution centre that mainly picks orders.
2. Your joint committee (paritair comité). In the logistics world, companies are spread across several joint committees — road transport and logistics, freight forwarding and international trade, or the committee covering their own industrial activity. Each of them has its own collective agreements on weekend work, premiums and allowances.
3. Your own documents. The work rules must contain the work schedules you actually use, including weekend schedules. If a Sunday schedule is not in there, you are scheduling something that formally does not exist — and that is exactly the first thing an inspector notices. See also which documents you need ready for a social inspection.

For agency workers, the same regime applies as for your permanent staff: what you may not schedule, the temp agency may not schedule either. More on that in scheduling agency workers in logistics.

Compensatory rest after Sunday work: the rule that most often goes wrong

If someone works on a Sunday within a permitted exception, that person is entitled to compensatory rest. The basic logic:

• The compensatory rest must fall within the six days following that Sunday.
• If the employee worked more than four hours on Sunday, it is a full day of compensatory rest.
• If they worked four hours or less, a half day is enough — to be taken before or after 1 p.m.
• Compensatory rest is unpaid as a separate day: the Sunday itself is paid normally, and the compensatory rest is the counter-performance in time, not extra pay.

An example from a distribution centre. Karim works Sunday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. on a rush shipment: eight hours, so more than four. He gets a full day of compensatory rest, and it has to fall between Monday and Saturday of that same week. If you schedule that rest day "somewhere later this month", you are in breach — even if Karim himself would prefer it that way.

The same principle applies to work on a public holiday, but with a different deadline and its own rules. So schedule public holidays separately; read planning public holidays in 2026 for that side of the story.

Rest periods: 11 hours, 35 hours and no more than six days

Weekend work usually does not fall apart on the Sunday itself, but on what connects to it before or after. Three limits to keep in mind at all times:

• 11 consecutive hours of rest between the end of one shift and the start of the next. A Saturday shift ending at 11 p.m. therefore cannot be followed by a Sunday start at 6 a.m.
• At least 35 consecutive hours of weekly rest (the 24 hours of Sunday rest plus the 11 hours of daily rest). In practice, that means you have to shield the shifts around the rest day, not just the rest day itself.
• A maximum of six working days per week. Seven days in a row is not "just pushing through", it is a violation.

Combine that with the ordinary limits on working time — in principle 8 hours a day and an average of 38 hours a week, with deviations via the work rules, a collective agreement or a flexible system. How to calculate that over a reference period is explained in maximum working time in Belgium.

Allowances: one statutory, the rest sector-based

Two different things tend to get mixed up here.

1. Statutory overtime pay. If someone works genuine overtime — above the daily or weekly limit that applies to your company — the statutory overtime premium is 50%. On Sundays and public holidays it rises to 100%. That is a legal minimum, and it is separate from whatever premium your sector provides.

2. Sector premiums for weekend and night work. Saturday premiums, Sunday premiums, shift premiums and night allowances come from your collective agreement, not from the Employment Act. They vary widely: a fixed amount per hour in one sector, a percentage of the basic hourly wage in another, sometimes linked to the shift's start time. So always check the agreements of your own joint committee before you start calculating percentages — or ask your payroll office (sociaal secretariaat) for an overview per shift type.

For shifts that run into the night, another layer comes on top; we unpack those rules in night work and allowances.

What you really want to avoid here: recalculating every weekend shift by hand. If you configure your shift types correctly once — Saturday shift, Sunday shift, night shift, public holiday — your scheduling can pass the right premium codes on to payroll automatically. That does not just save time, it mainly saves arguments after the fact.

Sharing weekend work fairly without Excel acrobatics

Beyond the legal side, weekend work has a social dimension. Who is doing two Sundays in a row? Who has not had a single weekend shift in the last four weeks? In warehouses with 40 or 80 people, a spreadsheet no longer gives you that overview.

What works in practice:

• A fixed rotation per team. For example a weekend crew that rotates every three weeks, so everyone knows when they are up.
• Schedule the compensatory rest immediately, not later. Put the rest day into the same draft as the Sunday shift. That way the six-day deadline cannot quietly expire.
• A volunteer pool for peaks. For exceptional Sundays, work with the people who put their hand up rather than the ones who complain least. Flexible work can play a role here, within the limits that apply to your sector.
• Let your system police the limits. A scheduling tool that warns you about less than 11 hours of rest or about a seventh working day catches errors before they end up in the payroll run.

Record what you plan — and what actually happened

Weekend work is exactly the kind of work where plan and reality drift apart: a truck arrives late, a shift runs two hours over, people swap among themselves. Without watertight time tracking you cannot demonstrate afterwards that the compensatory rest was granted, that the 11-hour rest was respected, or that the overtime premium was calculated correctly.

And that is only becoming more important: the move towards mandatory digital working-time registration turns a paper weekend list into a risk rather than a solution. Anyone already recording per shift who actually worked when simply has that file ready.

Checklist for your weekend roster

• Does the activity fall under a permitted exception to Sunday rest?
• Are the weekend schedules included in the work rules?
• Is the compensatory rest scheduled within six days after the Sunday, and for the right duration (full or half day)?
• Is there at least 11 hours of rest between two shifts and 35 hours of weekly rest?
• Is nobody working more than six days in a row?
• Are the correct premiums and overtime percentages defined per shift type?
• Are the actual hours recorded and stored?
• Can you explain how weekend shifts are distributed across the team?

In logistics, weekend work is not an edge case but a structural part of the service you sell. Once the rules are properly built into your rosters and shift types, it stops being a source of stress — it is just scheduling. For the full legal context on Sunday rest and working time, the FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue remains the reference, and for sector premiums, your joint committee.