Human Resource Blog

New Jersey Smoking Breaks

How many smoking breaks is an employer in New Jersey legally required to give an employee, per day?

There is no federal or state law that mandates a New Jersey employer to provide a smoking break for workers.

In addition, there is no state or federal law that mandates breaks for New Jersey employees. A company has the legal right to ask workers to perform their job for 8, even 12 hours without a lunch break, or any break. The length of the shift doesn’t matter.

Most companies do provide breaks for their workers. The standard for an 8 hour shift is usually two 15 minutes breaks and one 30 minute break for lunch. These breaks can be used for anything the employee wants including smoking. There is no reason for any company to provide workers any additional smoking time.

Even in states that do require one or two work breaks per shift, there are no legal provisions for additional smoking breaks.

Employers are required by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to pay their employees for all breaks of less than 20 minutes. In addition, any break where an employee may need to be called back to work must be a paid break as well. An employee that takes 5 or so minutes several times a day to smoke is actually asking to be paid for unproductive work time. Companies do not have to allow smoking breaks at all, and those that do are allowed to define and set whatever limits they wish.

Actually, a business could require that a smoking break be an unpaid break of 20 minutes and require the worker to clock out for that time. Not many businesses put this into practice, however, because fairness would require them to provide these 20 minute breaks to nonsmokers as well. Then the business would have that many more workers away from their job, which is not conducive to productivity.

Most businesses ask smokers to limit smoking breaks to 5 or 10 minutes and 3 to 5 breaks per shift. Even with these limits, that means up to 50 minutes of unproductive time per shift, per smoker. With the smoking indoors being prohibited now by so many workplaces, this time away from the workstation is becoming an issue. JH