AI staff scheduling for restaurants: tools, prices and fair workweek laws

AI scheduling tools draft next week's schedule from your past sales, staff availability and labor targets, and a manager checks it before posting. 7shifts and Homebase both print free plans, and their AI features sit in paid plans. If your restaurant falls under a fair workweek law, pick a tool that warns you before you post or change a shift late.

Our shortlist of AI tools by job names scheduling apps next to phone, kitchen and marketing tools, and the single-store starting guide shows how to count the hours scheduling takes you now. This page covers what each scheduling tool prints about its AI and price, which scheduling laws reach restaurants, and a four-week trial.

What does an AI scheduling tool do?

The vendors describe four jobs. The tool forecasts sales by hour from your POS history, suggests how many people each hour needs, fills shifts from templates and each person's availability, and flags breaks, overtime or local rules before you publish.

The tool does not know about the street fair on Saturday, the cook who is best on the grill, or the server who is back from leave. Plan on a manager reading every draft against the week's events, as our planning table for tasks handed to tools suggests.

What do the main tools cost and what does their AI do?

Tool	What its own page says	Printed price	Labor-law features it lists	Start here if
7shifts	Forecasts sales from historical sales and labor data to build schedules, and auto-fills shifts from past schedules and availability	7shifts: Comp free for one location and up to 15 employees; Essentials $39.99, Pro $79.99 and Premium $134.99 per month per location on annual billing, the page's default	Alerts while you schedule; fair workweek, call-in pay and right-to-rest rules for places including Chicago, New York and Philadelphia	You run a restaurant in a city with a scheduling law
Homebase	An AI Scheduling Assistant builds a schedule for you to review, tweak and send	Homebase, monthly billing: Basic $0 for one location and up to 10 employees; Essentials $30; Plus, with the AI assistant, $70 per location a month, shown as $0 for six months when you add Homebase payroll; All-in-One $120	Overtime alerts and notices of federal and state labor law changes, listed under All-in-One	You are a small team and want to start free
Toast Scheduling (Sling by Toast)	Automated sales forecasting and projected labor cost for each shift as you schedule	No separate price printed; Toast's payroll bundle, which includes basic scheduling, starts at $69 a month plus $9 per employee a month	Automated schedule enforcement; ask Toast which local rules it covers	You already run Toast
Square Shifts	Scheduling, time-off requests, shift swaps and labor-versus-sales reports; the Shifts page names no AI feature	Included in Square Plus and Square Premium; see Square's restaurant pricing	Overtime and break tracking	You run Square and want one bill

Sources: 7shifts pricing, scheduling and labor compliance pages; Homebase pricing and scheduling pages; Toast's scheduling page and pricing page; the Square Shifts page.

On 7shifts, the Premium plan card lists advanced hourly labor forecasts and labor recommendations, and the Pro card lists labor compliance tools. Ask 7shifts which plan includes the AI sales forecast its scheduling page describes before you choose one.

What would a 20-person restaurant pay?

Take one location with 20 hourly staff. That rules out both free plans: 7shifts Comp stops at 15 employees and Homebase Basic at 10. The yearly figures are the printed monthly price times 12, with no add-ons.

Plan	Why you might pick it	Per month	Per year
Homebase Essentials	Lowest printed price here for 20 staff	Homebase Essentials: $30	Homebase Essentials yearly: $360
7shifts Essentials	Covers up to 30 employees	7shifts Essentials: $39.99	7shifts Essentials yearly: $479.88
Homebase Plus	Lowest Homebase plan with the AI Scheduling Assistant	Homebase Plus: $70	Homebase Plus yearly: $840
7shifts Pro	Lowest 7shifts plan whose card lists labor compliance tools	7shifts Pro: $79.99	7shifts Pro yearly: $959.88
7shifts Premium	The plan whose card lists advanced labor forecasts	7shifts Premium: $134.99	7shifts Premium yearly: $1,619.88

Homebase shows monthly prices by default and 7shifts shows annual ones, so the Homebase and 7shifts rows use different billing terms. Homebase's six free months of Plus come with its payroll add-on, which the page lists at $49 a month plus $6 per employee paid after the free period. Price both on the billing term you will actually pick.

Which fair workweek laws reach restaurants?

Several cities and one state require covered employers to post schedules in advance and pay extra for late changes. Most reach chains and franchise groups. Berkeley's can reach a group of three restaurants. The table quotes each official page. Read the full rules for your city and ask a lawyer whether they cover you; this page is not legal advice.

Place	Which restaurants, per the official page	Schedule notice	Date to know
New York City	Fast food employers	14 days, plus regular schedules that stay the same week to week	December 1, 2025: the city announced a $38.9 million Fair Workweek settlement with Starbucks
Chicago	Restaurants with at least 30 locations and 250 employees globally; covered workers earn up to $33.85 an hour or $64,945.55 a year	14 days	In effect since July 1, 2020
Seattle	Food service employers with 500 or more employees worldwide; full-service restaurants also need 40 or more full-service locations	14 days	In effect since July 1, 2017
Oregon	Retail, hospitality and food service employers with at least 500 employees worldwide	14 calendar days	2017 law; amendments passed in 2025 take effect July 1, 2027
Philadelphia	Service, retail and hospitality employers with at least 250 employees and 30 locations worldwide, including chains and franchises	14 days	In effect since April 1, 2020; predictability pay enforced from June 1, 2021
Berkeley	Restaurants with 10 or more employees in Berkeley and 100 or more globally, or franchisees in a network of 100 or more	14 days	Operational since January 12, 2024
Evanston	Food service and restaurant employers with at least 30 locations globally and 200 employees	14 days	Effective January 1, 2024
Los Angeles	The city's law covers retail businesses with 300 or more employees globally; its page does not list restaurants	14 days, for retail	In effect since April 1, 2023

Berkeley's own FAQ gives the example of a company with three restaurants, one in Berkeley with 20 employees and two in Oakland with 40 each. With exactly 100 employees in total, it is covered. A small group near that line should count every employee, salaried and temporary staff included, the way the FAQ describes.

Late changes cost money under these laws. New York City's page, for example, says fast food employers need a worker's written consent and a $100 premium for a "clopening," a closing shift followed by an opening shift the next morning. Oregon's page lists one extra hour of pay when an employer adds more than 30 minutes to a shift without 14 days' notice.

What should the tool do if a law covers you?

1. Let you set rules for each location, so a Chicago store and a suburban store follow different rules.
2. Warn you before you publish a schedule less than 14 days ahead, and again when you change a shift inside that window.
3. Work out the premium owed for each late change, so you can check it against your own sum.
4. Flag short rest between a closing and an opening shift. Chicago counts 10 hours, Evanston 11.
5. Keep every schedule, change and consent on record. Philadelphia's page lists a failure to keep records for two years as a violation.

In New York City, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection publishes recommended software specifications and a checklist that software vendors can fill in. Ask any vendor you are weighing to complete that checklist.

How do you run a four-week trial?

1. Before you start: write down how long you spend building and fixing each week's schedule, and your labor cost as a share of sales. Our labor cost guide shows the sum.
2. Weeks 1 and 2: build each week twice, by hand and with the tool. Post your own. Compare the tool's hours with yours in your busiest two-hour block and your slowest.
3. Weeks 3 and 4: post the tool's draft after your edits. Count each edit you made and why.
4. Every week: note each change made less than 14 days out and what it would cost under the rules for your city, whether or not a law covers you yet.
5. At the end: compare time spent, labor cost share and late changes with your starting figures. Ask three staff whether the app made swaps easier.

Stay on monthly billing until the trial ends, and read the cancellation terms first. Our vendor question list covers data export and exit. For a group of stores, the multi-unit guide covers rollout order.

If the phone is what pulls a server off the floor at the rush, that is a separate job. Maple's phone answering and ordering answers calls and passes the ones that need a person to staff, and our lunch rush phone coverage guide shows how to plan who picks up.

Published by Maple. This AI-assisted guide combines 7shifts, Homebase, Toast and Square product and pricing pages and official city and state pages on scheduling laws with an original cost table and trial plan. It is not legal advice, does not report a test of any scheduling tool, and does not promise any saving.