Massachusetts restaurant payroll topics to verify before each review cycle

This page is deliberately framed as what to verify rather than as a statement of the law. Every figure below changes on its own schedule, and a restaurant payroll page that freezes this year’s numbers into prose is wrong within a year and stays wrong for three.

So each item names the topic, explains why it reaches a restaurant specifically, and points at the official source. Check the source.

Earned sick time

Accrual applies broadly, but whether the time is paid turns on your employee count — and that is exactly the variable a restaurant moves across seasonally without noticing.

What to verify each cycle:

• Your current employee count, measured the way the rule measures it — not the way your schedule counts it.
• Which side of the paid threshold you are on, and whether you crossed it recently.
• That accrual is actually running in your payroll system for everyone, including part-time and seasonal staff.
• That balances carry over correctly, and that your handbook describes the same rules your system applies.

Paid Family and Medical Leave

Contribution obligations turn on a covered-individual count, and the contribution rate itself is periodically adjusted. Both are worth rechecking rather than carrying forward.

• The current contribution rate — do not assume last year’s.
• Your covered-individual count against the threshold that changes the employer share.
• That deductions on the employee side are being taken correctly and shown on the pay stub.
• That the required notice and poster obligations have actually been met, which is easy to overlook in a restaurant with no office noticeboard.

Minimum wage and the tipped cash wage

Two numbers, and one recurring calculation that matters more than either of them.

• The current state minimum wage.
• The current tipped cash wage where a tip credit is taken.
• The tip-credit check, per employee, per period. Cash wage plus tips must reach full minimum wage for the period. A quiet week is when this fails, and it fails silently. Mechanics are in the tipped-payroll workflow guide.
• Overtime calculated on the correct basis for tipped employees and for anyone working multiple rates.

New-hire reporting

This one is missed more than any other item on this page, for a structural reason: it runs on a deadline tied to the hire date, and nothing inside a restaurant reminds anyone that it exists. It is not part of the onboarding packet, so it is not part of the habit.

• Every hire reported, within the deadline, every time.
• Rehires handled correctly — a returning seasonal employee may still need reporting.
• The reporting step is tied to your payroll cycle rather than left to memory. See the Massachusetts onboarding checklist.

Withholding

• Both federal and state withholding certificates on file for everyone. A missing state form is the more common of the two.
• Withholding schedules current — these are reissued periodically and a stale table produces quietly wrong withholding for everybody.
• Deposit frequency correct for your liability level.

The figures currently recorded on this site

Published with sources and review dates, so you can see how current they are rather than having to trust them:

Building the check into the cycle

None of this is difficult individually. It is difficult because it is recurring, it is spread across several authorities, and each item has its own clock. The practical answer is to attach each check to something that already happens — the tip-credit check to the payroll run, new-hire reporting to the hire, threshold checks to the monthly review in the owner’s HR checklist — rather than maintaining a separate compliance calendar nobody opens.

That is how BOHO works with Massachusetts restaurants: the checks sit inside the weekly cycle, and every figure the service relies on carries a source and a review date.

What this page is not

It is not legal or tax advice, and it is not a complete statement of Massachusetts employment obligations. Several items turn on facts specific to your restaurant — headcount measured a particular way, entity structure, and the roles involved. Verify against the official sources listed below and confirm your position with qualified counsel and your tax adviser.