The legal support in the payment of rest days can be found in article 152 of the Labor Code, which establishes that every worker has the right to an absolute day of rest after each week or every six days of continuous work.

What is an absolute rest?

A minimum rest of 24 hours and implies a fixed day of rest per week.

The aforementioned article establishes that it is mandatory to give workers a day off. It even mentions that the employer who does not comply with this stipulation may incur in legal penalties.

In addition, the employer will be obliged to remunerate that day with double the salary that is ordinarily payed in the event that the employer requests their employees to work on their rest days.

However, in daily business, economic and market productivity, workers are sometimes required to collaborate with the company either by working overtime and when it is considered necessary (exceptionally) to work on their rest day. And this type of situations is quite common to find covered in employment contracts.

This may occur as long as there is a voluntary agreement between the parties to carry out work on the rest day,

How does the worker’s rest day payment work?

In the payment of rest days, the payment of rest days, The employer should consider that it will depend on the payment method that was established in the contract.

The rest day will be included in the salary if the modality of payment to the worker is:
1. Per month.
2. For fortnight.
3. In the case of workers who provide their services in commercial establishments, it should be understood that the activity of the company involves commercial activity (regardless of the method of payment (whether monthly, weekly, or biweekly)

Since under these modalities of payment every day of the month should be recognized, therefore, the day of rest is included in the remuneration, and regarding point # 3 the nature of the commercial activity has its legal basis and was arranged in this way, according to the spirit of the legislator.

How to proceed if the employee works on his day off?

A double payment must be made, as expressly indicated in the rule, and in these cases in particular, the way to proceed is to add a single payment to the salary paid in the ordinary way, to complete the double payment.

How is the rest day paid to people who do not carry out business activities?

In these cases, if the company’s payment method is biweekly or monthly, it works exactly the same as in the cases described above. That is, a simple salary must be added to the usual payment to complete the double payment.
However, when the employee is paid weekly and it is not a business activity, they must be paid double (two simple wages) for working on their day off.

The reason for this is because the weekly payment method in this particular case, is not included in the rest day.

What happens if you work on a rest day and additionally overtime?

When employees of a company, business or office are asked to work on their day off, as has been emphasized, they are paid double, so each extra hour must be paid at one and a half times that day. That is, the double wage for the day is multiplied by 1.5 to obtain the value of overtime.

Another way to calculate overtime that day is to multiply the value of the hour by three, thus obtaining the same result.

We hope that the information provided in this article is useful to apply daily in worker-employer relations and in this way avoid unnecessary conflicts in order to maintain a healthy workplace environment.

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