The default assumption
Unless your contract or local law says otherwise, a meal break is time you are not being paid to work. That is why payroll systems clock you out for lunch, and why an honest salary timer should freeze the counter for the same window.
Short rest breaks (coffee, stretch) are often paid. Meal breaks are the ones that usually are not. The only reliable source is your agreement — not a generic calculator that assumes 2,080 tidy hours and a lunch that somehow still counts as work.
Two places the same fact shows up
Unpaid lunch is not a UI nicety. It changes two linked numbers on this site:
- Your hourly rate — fewer paid hours per year means a different rate for the same salary. Covered in hourly rate from annual salary and the hourly rate calculator.
- Today's live total — while you are on an unpaid break, accrued pay should stop. That is what the salary timer on the homepage does when you add a break in Set my pay.
If either side ignores the break, the story falls apart. A “live” number that climbs through unpaid lunch is not live — it is optimistic.
Why the pause matters in practice
If the counter keeps climbing through an unpaid lunch, two things go wrong at once: today's “earned” total is too high, and the implied hourly rate looks better than the rate you actually live. Over a year, half an hour a day is more than three full working weeks of fiction.
That fiction shows up in bad decisions: staying late because the day “already paid well,” accepting a low overtime offer because the base rate looked healthier than it is, or comparing two jobs without aligning how lunch is treated.
The product rule on this site is simple: breaks you mark as unpaid are unpaid. The status line says so. The big number holds still until paid time resumes. That is the same honesty described in how salary timers work.
Paid lunch, unpaid lunch, and what to enter
- Unpaid meal break — add it in the timer settings. The counter freezes for that window.
- Paid meal break — do not add it. The counter keeps running, matching the contract.
- Unsure — check the contract or handbook. Do not let a default 2,080 calculator decide for you.
Set it once on the Salary Timer homepage, then forget it until the schedule changes. The live timer, the rate math, and these Learn pages are meant to stay consistent on that one point: unpaid time does not earn.