A clock, an interrupted power line and a shelter with people inside

Power cuts, air-raid alerts and working time in Ukraine: what the law actually requires

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Rules checked on 22 September 2026. The martial-law rules described here apply while martial law is in force.

Every employer in Ukraine runs on an interrupted day. The power goes off, the alert sounds, people go to the shelter, the work stops and starts again. Foreign head offices ask three questions about it, and only two of them have clean statutory answers:

  1. Do we pay for the time? Partly answered — by the idle-time rules.
  2. Must we provide a shelter? Yes, clearly.
  3. How do we record it? Not answered by any statute. You have to decide, write it down and apply it consistently.

This briefing sets out what the law says, and is equally clear about where it says nothing.

1. A power cut is “idle time”, and idle time has a price

Ukrainian law has a specific concept for work stopping: простій, idle time. Article 34 of the Labour Code defines it as a stoppage of work caused by the absence of the organisational or technical conditions needed to do the work, by force majeure, or by other circumstances. A power cut that stops the work is squarely inside that definition.

Article 113 then sets the price:

Situation What you pay
Idle time not through the employee's fault At least two thirds of the employee's tariff rate or salary
Idle time where a situation dangerous to life or health has arisen, not through the employee's fault Average earnings — the full rate, not two thirds
Idle time through the employee's fault Nothing

Two thirds is a floor, not a ceiling. Many employers in Ukraine pay full salary through short outages because the alternative — recalculating pay for a two-hour interruption — costs more in administration than it saves.

The dangerous-situation line is worth reading twice — and then reading the exact words. Article 113 preserves average earnings, not two thirds, where the stoppage arises from a situation dangerous to the life or health of the employee, the people around them or the environment. That sounds made for an air raid.

The catch is the adjective. The Ukrainian text says виробнича ситуація — a work or production situation. That wording points at hazards arising out of the work itself: a gas leak, an unsafe machine, a collapsing structure. A missile threat is an external event, not something the production process created, and that is a real argument against applying Article 113(3) to alerts.

We found no court decision or official clarification either way. So: it is an argument available to an employee, not a rule you can rely on, and not a rule you can safely dismiss. If you are choosing between two thirds and full pay for alert time, it is one reason among several to lean towards full pay.

Idle time is not the same as suspension. Suspending an employment contract under Article 13 of Law No. 2136-IX means the employer pays nothing at all, and it is only available where both sides are unable to perform because of the armed aggression. A power cut in a Kyiv office is not that. Using suspension for ordinary outages is the mistake that turns into back pay for the whole period.

2. Shelters are a hard legal duty

The Code of Civil Protection, Article 20, puts these obligations on every business:

  • provide means of collective protection — shelter — for all of its employees (added in November 2023), and for visitors at premises with mass attendance;
  • provide employees with personal protective equipment;
  • display information on safety measures and correct behaviour during dangerous events, in a form accessible to people with sight and hearing impairments;
  • organise and carry out evacuation of employees and property;
  • train employees to act in emergencies and in the special period;
  • carry out a risk assessment for the entity's facilities and keep risks within acceptable levels.

Note what the duty is not: the law requires you to provide shelter for your people, not necessarily to own one. In practice that means a suitable space in the building, an agreement with the nearest public shelter, or a documented arrangement with the landlord. If you rent, this belongs in the lease and in your induction pack, and it is worth having in writing which shelter your people go to and how long it takes to get there.

Check: the State Emergency Service publishes reference material on organising shelter in the civil-defence protective structures fund, along with its regulatory framework and public guidance. The portal has an English version.

3. Working time under martial law: what changed

Article 6 of Law No. 2136-IX rewrites a good part of the working-time chapter while martial law lasts:

Rule Normally Under martial law
Normal working week 40 hours Up to 60 hours for employees at critical infrastructure facilities
Employees entitled to reduced hours, at critical infrastructure facilities Reduced per the Labour Code Up to 40 hours
Five- or six-day week Set with the union Set by the employer
Start and end of the working day Internal rules Set by the employer
Weekly continuous rest 42 hours May be cut to 24 hours

Article 6(6) also disapplies a list of Labour Code articles: 53 (shortened day before holidays), 65(1) (annual overtime limits), 67(3)–(5), 71 (work on rest days), 73 (public holidays) and 78-1 (holidays not counted towards leave), plus Article 5(2) of the Leave Act.

Two consequences foreign employers keep missing. Public holidays are not days off during martial law. Article 73, which makes them non-working days, does not apply — and because Article 107 (double pay for work on a holiday) is triggered by Article 73(4), disapplying Article 73 removes the basis for holiday premium pay as well. Those dates are worked as ordinary days. That is also why the annual working-time norm is higher than a pre-war calendar would give: our salary calculator uses 2,088 hours for 2026 for exactly this reason. And the 60-hour week is not a general licence: it applies to employees at critical infrastructure facilities, not to every company that would like longer hours.

4. Remote and home working: you can order it

This is the most useful and least known provision in the whole area. Articles 60-1 and 60-2 of the Labour Code both say the same thing: where there is a threat of armed aggression or an emergency of a technological, natural or other character — as well as for epidemics and required self-isolation — home-based work and remote work may be introduced by an order of the employer, without a written contract on remote work.

The conditions:

  • the employee is informed of the order within two days of it being made, but before the remote work starts;
  • Article 32(3) does not apply — so you do not need the usual two months' notice of a change to essential working conditions.

That is what lets a Ukrainian employer move a team home for a week of heavy strikes without renegotiating contracts. Two points to keep straight: under remote work the employee chooses their own workplace and distributes their own working time, and the internal work rules do not apply to them unless the contract says otherwise (Article 60-2) — though total hours still cannot exceed the Article 50 and 51 norms. And remote work is forbidden where there are dangerous or harmful production factors.

Equipment and compensation are contractual: who provides the laptop, who pays for the employee's own equipment, internet and power, and how expenses are reimbursed all have to be written down (Article 60-2). In a country where employees are buying power stations and Starlink terminals, that clause is not boilerplate.

5. What the law does not say

No statute tells you how to treat time spent in a shelter. We searched the Labour Code, Law No. 2136-IX and the Code of Civil Protection: the phrase “air-raid alert” does not appear in any of them, and none of them contains a pay or working-time rule for alert time. The Code of Civil Protection creates the duty to shelter; it says nothing about paying for the time.

So you are choosing between three defensible treatments, and the choice should be written into your internal rules and applied consistently:

Treatment Argument for Watch out for
Paid working time — the alert is part of the working day Simplest to administer; matches what most employers do; avoids arguments Costs more where alerts are long and frequent
Idle time at average earnings (Art. 113(3)) The alert is a situation dangerous to life or health Untested for alerts, and the statute says виробнича — a work situation
Idle time at two thirds (Art. 113(1)) The plain idle-time rule Reads badly to staff; invites the argument that it should have been Art. 113(3)

Whichever you choose, keep the time records straight — the duty to keep them is real. Article 30(2) of the Law on Remuneration of Labour obliges the employer to ensure reliable accounting of the work performed by the employee and accounting of payroll costs in the established procedure. There is no statutory document called a “timesheet”: Form П-5, approved by State Statistics Committee Order No. 489 of 5 December 2008, is recommended, not compulsory — the State Statistics Service confirmed this in clarification No. 9/4-10/9 of 12 January 2012. Keep the record in your payroll system, an attendance app or a controlled spreadsheet if you prefer; it must be current, reliable and reconcilable to payroll.

Be precise about the penalty risk: the Labour Code’s express fine for false time records (Article 265) is narrow — it applies to employees on contracts with non-fixed working hours, at three times the minimum wage per person. The wider exposure is indirect. Records that do not match what was paid are what turn a routine question into a finding, and underpaid or unpaid interruption time is a pay claim on its own. Both are the sort of thing an inspection surfaces — see labour inspections under martial law.

6. A practical set-up

  1. Write an internal rule covering outages and alerts: how time is treated, how it is recorded, and who decides when work stops and restarts.
  2. Put shelter arrangements in writing — which shelter, how long to reach it, who checks that everyone is out, and how it is covered in the lease.
  3. Run the training the Code of Civil Protection requires, and keep the attendance record.
  4. Pre-draft the remote-work order so it can be issued in an hour rather than a day, and remember the two-day notification rule.
  5. Decide the equipment and compensation clause — laptops, connectivity, power — and put it in the remote-work terms.
  6. Keep the time sheet current through interruptions, including who was on remote work on which days.
  7. Do not reach for suspension of employment contracts for ordinary outages; it is for the case where neither side can perform at all.

How ClarusApex can help

For the people employed through APEX AV LLC we carry all of this: the internal rules, the time records through interruptions, the remote-work orders and the civil-protection training. For companies with their own Ukrainian entity we review how outage and alert time is being paid and recorded, which is one of the first things an inspector asks about. See Start up and stay compliant.

Sources

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