Overtime Hours Calculator

Overtime pay is a premium on the regular rate, not a separate wage. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires covered non-exempt employees to receive at least one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a fixed and regularly recurring workweek of 168 consecutive hours. The regular rate is not simply the quoted hourly wage; under 29 CFR part 778 it must include nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, and production commissions, all divided by total hours actually worked. Where an employee works at two rates in one week, the premium is computed on the weighted average of those rates. Hours may not be averaged across two weeks, except under the narrow 8-and-80 rule available to hospitals and residential care establishments. Daily thresholds and double time come from state law rather than federal law. California requires 1.5 times pay after 8 hours in a workday and after 40 in a week, and 2.0 times after 12 hours in a day or after 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day of a workweek; Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado also use daily triggers. Exemption from overtime depends on both a salary-basis test and a duties test, and the salary floor has moved repeatedly, from 455 dollars per week under the 2004 rule to 684 dollars per week effective January 2020, with subsequent increases contested in litigation. In practice most overtime liability arises from misclassification or from omitting bonuses from the regular rate, not from arithmetic errors.

The 40-hour standard was a political achievement long before it was a payroll rule. Union campaigns for the eight-hour day ran from the 1860s through the general strike of May 1886, and the Adamson Act of 1916 imposed an eight-hour standard day on interstate railroads. Earlier attempts at federal wage and hour regulation failed in the courts, and the National Industrial Recovery Act codes of 1933 were struck down in 1935, so a durable statute had to wait. The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on June 25, 1938, phased the maximum workweek down from 44 hours to 42 in 1939 and to 40 from October 1940, requiring time and a half beyond it. The premium was designed less as a reward for effort than as a deliberate tax on long hours, intended to spread scarce work across more workers during the Depression. The Supreme Court upheld the Act in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. in 1941. Later amendments extended coverage to retail, service, agricultural, and public employees; following the 1985 Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority decision, Congress amended the Act that year to let state and local employers grant compensatory time off at 1.5 hours per overtime hour instead of cash. The white-collar exemption tests have been revised repeatedly since 1940, most consequentially in 2004 and 2019, and remain the central dispute over who is owed the premium at all.