The Exclusion That Matters Most to a Staffing Firm
Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries states the predictive scheduling law directly: it covers retail, hospitality, and food-service employers with 500 or more employees worldwide, and it explicitly excludes workers supplied by worker-leasing companies from coverage, the regulatory term for what a staffing agency does when it places a worker with a client. Exempt salaried employees are excluded too.
Read narrowly, that exclusion means a staffing agency itself is not the entity the law regulates. Read practically, it means the agency’s covered clients, the ones with 500 or more employees in retail, hospitality, or food service, are the ones the law binds, and a staffing firm placing workers into those clients needs to understand the obligation its client is operating under, even where the law does not reach the agency directly.
What a Covered Employer Owes a Worker
A covered Oregon employer must provide a written schedule at least 14 calendar days before the first scheduled shift, post that schedule somewhere visible, and give new hires a written, good-faith estimate of expected monthly hours at the time of hiring, per Oregon BLI’s own published guidance.
Change that posted schedule without proper notice and predictability pay kicks in: one additional hour of regular pay for adding 30 or more minutes of work, changing shift timing without reducing hours, or scheduling a new shift with insufficient notice; half the regular hourly rate for each scheduled hour not worked when subtracting hours, rescheduling, canceling a shift, or not calling in an on-call worker.
Beyond Oregon: A Growing Municipal Patchwork
Oregon is the only state with a statewide law, but it is not the only jurisdiction. A 2026 HR-compliance guide published by Deel names 10 cities and counties with their own fair workweek ordinances: San Francisco, Emeryville, and Berkeley in California, plus Los Angeles city and Los Angeles County separately; Chicago and Evanston in Illinois; Philadelphia; Seattle; and New York City.
A parallel, opposite trend is running at the same time. The same guide names 11 states that have enacted preemption laws specifically to block their own cities and counties from passing scheduling ordinances of this kind: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. A staffing firm operating client relationships across state lines is genuinely dealing with three different regulatory postures at once, an active statewide law, an active city ordinance, or a state that has deliberately foreclosed the possibility of one.
Why a Staffing Firm Should Track This Even Where It Is Exempt
The compliance obligation belongs to the covered client in Oregon, not the placing agency, but a staffing firm that treats this as entirely someone else’s problem misses the actual business relevance. A client operating under predictive-scheduling rules has real constraints on how it can adjust shift assignments on short notice, constraints that shape how far in advance a staffing firm needs to confirm placements, how it communicates schedule changes to placed workers, and what it can credibly promise a prospective client about flexibility.
For a firm working the light-industrial and retail segment VA Horizon’s staffing niche verticalization guide already covers on the business-development side, being able to speak fluently about this compliance layer in a client conversation is a real differentiator, not a legal requirement the agency itself has to meet.
What a Multi-State Staffing Firm Should Do
Two things, done consistently, cover most of the practical exposure. First, know which of a firm’s client relationships sit in a covered jurisdiction, Oregon statewide or one of the 10 named cities and counties, versus a preemption state where no local ordinance is even legally possible. Second, build placement and schedule-change communication with covered clients around the 14-day and notice-driven mechanics described above, even where the agency itself is formally exempt, since the client’s obligations shape what a smooth placement requires.
The municipal list above is compiled from a 2026 HR-compliance guide, not each city’s own ordinance text directly. Confirm the current list against the specific jurisdiction’s own ordinance before advising a client on it as settled law.
What this means for you
- Oregon’s statewide predictive scheduling law explicitly excludes workers supplied by worker-leasing companies, the staffing-agency exclusion, but still binds any covered client a staffing firm places into.
- Beyond Oregon, 10 cities and counties have their own fair workweek ordinances, while 11 states have passed preemption laws blocking their cities from writing one at all, per a 2026 Deel compliance guide.
- A covered employer that changes a posted schedule without proper notice owes predictability pay, from half the regular hourly rate up to a full additional hour, depending on what changed.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, Predictive Scheduling
- Deel, Fair Workweek Laws by State: The 2026 HR Compliance Guide