Predictive Scheduling Laws in 2026: Which Cities and States Are Next?

Last updated: May 2026

Predictive scheduling laws now cover 11 U.S. jurisdictions — including three added since January 2024. Eleven other states have banned these laws entirely. And at least eight more have active legislation under consideration. There is no federal standard.

For multi-location employers, predictive scheduling compliance in 2026 means navigating a two-speed regulatory map: fair workweek ordinances expanding city by city in some states, while preemption laws block them in others.

The gap is widest for enterprises operating across both types of jurisdictions. Your LA County retail locations became subject to fair workweek rules on July 1, 2025. Your Chicago stores have followed a different set of scheduling requirements since 2020. Your Atlanta locations? Georgia banned cities from passing these laws entirely. Same company — three completely different compliance realities.

Which U.S. Jurisdictions Have Predictive Scheduling Laws in 2026?

Eleven U.S. jurisdictions currently enforce predictive scheduling or fair workweek laws. Oregon is the only state with a statewide mandate. The remaining ten are city- or county-level ordinances.

Three jurisdictions have been added since 2024: Berkeley, CA (January 2024), Evanston, IL (January 2024), and Los Angeles County (July 1, 2025).

The table below provides the most current jurisdiction-level reference for predictive scheduling laws by state and city.

Nearly every jurisdiction requires 14 days' advance notice of work schedules. The details diverge sharply beyond that.

Coverage thresholds range from 10 employees (Berkeley) to 500 (Oregon, Seattle). Rest periods range from 9 hours (Philadelphia) to 11 hours (New York City, Berkeley, Emeryville, Evanston). Penalty structures vary from $500 per violation in San Francisco to $1,000 per employee plus $500 per violation in Berkeley and Emeryville.

Predictability pay is the compliance element that trips up most organizations. Predictability pay is the premium employers owe when they change a posted schedule within the advance notice window. It's not a single rule — it's a matrix of different rates for additions vs. reductions, different windows for 14-day vs. 24-hour changes, and different clopening premiums by city. (A "clopening" shift is when an employee closes one shift and opens the next with insufficient rest between — typically fewer than 10–11 hours.)

For a CHRO managing locations across four or five of these jurisdictions, each scheduling decision carries jurisdiction-specific financial consequences.

Which States Ban Predictive Scheduling Laws?

The expansion story is only half the picture. Eleven states have passed preemption laws that explicitly prohibit local governments from enacting predictive scheduling ordinances:

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

These preemption laws are a direct legislative response to the fair workweek movement. Georgia's preemption statute was specifically framed to prevent municipalities from imposing scheduling mandates on employers.

The practical effect for multi-location enterprises: if you operate in both Chicago (fair workweek ordinance enforced since 2020) and Indianapolis (Indiana preemption blocks any local equivalent), your compliance posture is fundamentally different by jurisdiction. Not by choice — by state politics.

One notable wrinkle: Michigan sits on both sides of this map. The state has an existing preemption law, yet it also appears on lists of states considering new predictive scheduling legislation.

Which States Are Considering Predictive Scheduling Laws?

At least nine states have introduced or actively considered predictive scheduling legislation in 2025–2026:

• Connecticut
• Hawaii
• Illinois (statewide expansion beyond Chicago and Evanston)
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• New Jersey
• North Carolina
• Rhode Island
• West Virginia

Not all of these bills will survive committee. Virginia's HB962 in early 2026 illustrates the pattern.

Virginia HB962 was prefiled in January 2026 — an omnibus labor bill that included predictive scheduling mandates for retail, hospitality, and food service employers with 500 or more employees. It would have required 14-day advance notice, 10-hour rest periods, predictability pay, and anti-retaliation protections.

On February 12, 2026, the House Labor and Commerce Subcommittee voted 7-0 to remove the bill. Industry coalitions — including hospitality and campground associations — mobilized effectively against it.

The pattern: state-level predictive scheduling bills face broader opposition than city-level ordinances. At the city level, affected employer coalitions are narrower and political dynamics favor worker protections. At the state level, industry associations organize across sectors and districts.

The jurisdictions most likely to adopt next aren't new states — they're new cities within states that haven't preempted. Evanston followed Chicago in 2024. Berkeley followed San Francisco and Emeryville in California. The pattern is city-to-city spread within sympathetic states.

Illinois statewide expansion would be the single biggest development to watch. If it passes, every employer in the state — not just those in Chicago and Evanston — would be covered.

What Are the Penalties for Violating Predictive Scheduling Laws?

Predictive scheduling penalties are assessed per violation, per employee, and per jurisdiction. The compounding math is what makes this a C-suite risk.

The scale of enforcement is already significant. In August 2022, Chipotle agreed to pay $20 million to resolve fair workweek violations affecting approximately 13,000 New York City workers — the largest fair workweek enforcement action in U.S. history at the time. Starbucks later settled for $38.9 million over similar violations affecting more than 15,000 NYC workers — the largest worker protection settlement in city history, according to the NYC Mayor's Office.

These are individual company settlements in a single city. Aggregate industry exposure across all jurisdictions is far larger.

In 2025 and 2026, retail employers in New York City and Seattle have faced "hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil penalties and employee restitution" in individual enforcement actions, according to Fisher Phillips. Enforcement has shifted from complaint-driven to proactive — agencies are initiating investigations, not waiting for workers to file.

Per-violation penalties by jurisdiction:

• San Francisco: $500 per violation
• Los Angeles City: Up to $500 per employee per violation
• New York City: $500 (first offense), $750 (second), $1,000 (third and subsequent) — within a two-year window
• Berkeley and Emeryville: $1,000 per employee plus $500 per violation

Consider a scenario: a retail enterprise with 1,000 hourly employees across New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. A single scheduling process failure — posting schedules 10 days in advance instead of 14 — triggers three different penalty regimes simultaneously. Different rates, different escalation structures, different enforcement agencies.

The U.S. Department of Labor has taken notice. DOL Fact Sheet 56B provides specific guidance on how state and local scheduling law penalties interact with FLSA regular rate calculations. When the federal government publishes compliance guidance on local penalties, enforcement attention follows.

What Should Multi-Location Employers Do About Fair Workweek Compliance?

Three actions matter now.

First, audit your jurisdiction exposure. Map every location against the 11 current jurisdictions and the 8 pending states. Know where you're covered today and where you may be covered by 2027. If you operate in a preemption state, don't assume you're permanently exempt — Michigan's shifting politics show these lines can move.

Second, stop managing compliance location by location. The patchwork of different coverage thresholds, notice periods, predictability pay rules, and penalty structures makes per-location manual processes unsustainable. This is a systems problem. It demands scheduling infrastructure that handles jurisdiction-level rules centrally — where adding a new jurisdiction means updating a configuration, not rebuilding a workflow. Compliance-first workforce management platforms with configurable rule engines — like WorkAxle, which automates multi-jurisdiction scheduling compliance across 22+ enterprise customers — treat new jurisdictions as configuration changes, not implementation projects.

Third, watch the enforcement trend, not just the legislation. New York City and Seattle show that existing laws are being enforced more aggressively than ever. Compliance gaps in current jurisdictions represent a bigger near-term financial risk than potential new laws in pending states.

The predictive scheduling map will keep splitting. Cities will keep passing ordinances. States will keep preempting — or considering adoption. The enterprises that manage this complexity are the ones whose compliance infrastructure was built for multi-jurisdiction rules from the start.

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