Shabbat and holiday pay
Most pay questions have a fixed answer. This one moves every week, because the boundary of the rest day is set by sunset rather than by the clock — and sunset is local. Getting it wrong is not a rounding error: it is the difference between paying 100% and 150% for the same hour.
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The premium starts at candle-lighting, not at a fixed hour
The weekly rest period begins on Friday at candle-lighting and ends on Saturday night at havdalah. Because both are derived from sunset, they shift a little every week and a lot across the year. A Friday shift that was entirely ordinary in December can cross into premium hours in June without anybody changing the roster.
The rate is 150% for rest-day work
Work during the weekly rest period is paid at 150% of the ordinary rate. That is the statutory floor: an employer may pay more, and many collective agreements do, but not less. The premium applies to the hours that fall inside the rest period, not to the whole shift — a shift that starts before candle-lighting is split at the boundary.
The same shift costs different amounts in different cities
Candle-lighting is not a single national time. Custom sets it 40 minutes before sunset in Jerusalem and 30 in Haifa, against a standard 18 minutes elsewhere. On 7 August 2026 that put candle-lighting at 18:50 in Jerusalem, 19:03 in Haifa and 19:13 in Tel Aviv — a 23-minute spread, and every minute of it is billed at 150%. If your teams work in more than one city, the branch decides the number.
Chag bills like Shabbat; erev chag splits like Friday
A full festival day is treated like the weekly rest day and paid at the same 150%. The eve of a festival behaves like a Friday: ordinary until candle-lighting, premium after it. This is why a payroll engine needs a real Hebrew calendar rather than a list of dates — the boundary depends on the same sunset calculation as an ordinary Friday.
Overtime stacks on top, up to a 200% ceiling
Rest-day work does not replace the overtime ladder, it raises its starting point. Extra hours on a rest day roll from 150% to 175% and then 200%, where the statutory calculation tops out. A long Shabbat shift therefore has three different rates inside it, which is exactly the sort of arithmetic that goes wrong by hand.
How Noviq applies this
Noviq resolves candle-lighting per team, because a team is a branch and a branch has a city. The workspace sets a default city and each team can override it; the timesheet then splits every Friday and festival eve at that branch’s real candle time, rolls the overtime ladder on top, and shows which hours landed in which bucket.