Defining the night window
Indian labour law does not use a single national definition of 'night'. The Factories Act treats a shift that extends beyond midnight as belonging to the day it began (s.51 explanation) and restricts women's work outside 06:00 to 19:00 unless the state notifies conditions. The OSH Code 2020 lets women work at night with their consent and subject to safety and transport conditions notified by the appropriate government. State Shops and Establishments Acts set their own limits.
For internal policy, most companies define the night shift as any shift with at least half its hours between 22:00 and 06:00, and use that definition to trigger night shift allowance and transport eligibility. Write the window into your shift template so that eligibility is derived from attendance, not from memory.
Attendance across midnight
The single biggest data problem with night shifts is the date. A guard who punches in at 20:00 on the 3rd and out at 08:00 on the 4th has worked one shift belonging to the 3rd. A register or app that assigns punches to calendar dates will show two half-days and a missing out-punch on the 3rd. The attendance register and the roster must both use the shift-start date.
Attendance software must therefore know that a shift crosses midnight and pair the punches accordingly. Payroll then receives one day, its hours, and any overtime beyond the shift length. Our guide on calculating night shift hours for payroll covers the arithmetic.
- Attach the whole shift to the start date in roster, register and payroll.
- Set the pairing window so an out-punch up to 12–14 hours later still belongs to the same shift.
- Handle the weekly off carefully: a night worker's rest day should be a full 24 hours after the last out-punch.
- Count public holidays by shift-start date, and say so in the policy.
Women on night shift and safety conditions
Under the OSH Code and the state rules issued under it, women may work between 19:00 and 06:00 only with their written consent and with safeguards that typically include transport from home to workplace and back, security at the premises, adequate lighting, CCTV, women security staff, and grouping of at least a minimum number of women on the shift. Several states already had similar notifications under the Factories Act or Shops and Establishments Acts.
Employers should keep the consent on record, log transport pickups and drops, and be able to show from attendance data which women worked which nights. Check the exact conditions in your state's OSH Code rules or, where those are pending, the existing state notification.
A housing society has one night post from 20:00 to 08:00. Guard Ram Singh punches in at 19:55 on 12 March and out at 08:05 on 13 March. The system attaches the shift to 12 March, records 12 hours, and flags 3 hours as beyond the 9-hour daily limit for the agency's overtime review. His night allowance for March counts one night for 12 March. His weekly off on 15 March begins after his out-punch at 08:00 on the 15th, so his next shift is not before 20:00 on the 16th.
Attend Mitra shift templates have a 'crosses midnight' setting that pairs the in-punch and out-punch across the date change and attaches the day to the shift-start date. Night shifts appear correctly on the live monitor, in the attendance register export and in payroll-ready reports, and night-count per employee can be exported to drive allowance payments.