Overtime Pay Calculator
Gross pay for the week, before deductions
$950.00
A blended $21.11 an hour across all 45 hours.
- First 40 hours at the regular rate
- $800.00
- 5 overtime hours at 1.5x
- $150.00
Fair Labor Standards Act: over 40 hours in a workweek at 1.5x the regular rate. This is the federal minimum, and it counts every hour you enter towards the forty — paid holiday, vacation and sick hours are not hours worked, so enter only the hours you actually worked. Several states — California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado among them — also require daily overtime, which can only make the figure larger, never smaller. Check your state, and the assumptions below, before treating this as the final number.
How this is calculated
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act a covered, non-exempt employee is owed one and a half times their regular rate for every hour worked beyond forty in a workweek. The threshold is weekly rather than daily, so nine hours on Monday followed by a short Friday is not federal overtime as long as the week totals forty or less. This calculator splits the week at forty, pays the first portion at the regular rate and the remainder at one and a half times it, and shows both parts separately along with the blended rate the week actually paid. That blended figure is worth looking at, because it is what the week cost per hour and it is the number that makes the difference between forty and forty-five hours legible. What this deliberately does not do is guess at your state. Several states require daily overtime on top of the federal weekly rule, and applying one state's rule to somebody in another would produce a number they cannot actually claim. Provided the hours you enter are hours you actually worked, and the ordinary forty-hour threshold is the one that applies to your job, the federal figure is the floor every state respects and state rules can only add to it. Enter paid holiday, vacation or sick hours, or work under one of the higher public-safety thresholds, and the figure can overstate what you are owed instead.
Worked example
The first forty hours pay $800.00 at the regular rate. The remaining five are overtime at one and a half times $20.00, which is $30.00 an hour, so $150.00. Together that is $950.00 for the week. Spread across all forty-five hours the week paid a blended $21.11 an hour, which is what five hours of overtime is really worth once it is averaged out.
Inputs: 45 hours worked at $20.00 an hour
Result: $950.00 gross, a blended $21.11 an hour
What this assumes
- Only hours you actually worked count toward the forty. Paid holiday, vacation and sick hours do not, even though they appear on your timesheet, so a week showing forty-five paid hours of which eight were holiday is a thirty-seven hour week with no federal overtime in it.
- Police, firefighters and other public-safety staff are covered by a separate federal rule with a higher threshold — commonly forty-three hours for law enforcement and fifty-three for fire protection — so this forty-hour calculation does not describe their overtime.
- This applies the federal FLSA rule only. State rules, including daily overtime in California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado, can require more and are not applied here.
- It assumes you are a covered, non-exempt employee. Exempt employees and genuine independent contractors are not owed overtime under the FLSA.
- The regular rate means your base hourly rate. If you receive non-discretionary bonuses or shift differentials, your true regular rate is higher than your base and the real figure is larger.
- The workweek is any fixed, recurring 168-hour period your employer has set. It does not have to start on Monday.
Questions
- Is this legal advice?
- No. It applies the federal formula to the figures you enter. Overtime disputes turn on facts this calculator has no access to, particularly whether you are correctly classified as non-exempt, and misclassification is common. For anything contested, talk to your state labor office or an employment lawyer.
- I worked ten hours on Monday. Is that overtime?
- Not under the federal rule, which counts the week rather than the day. It may well be under your state's rule if you are in one of the daily-overtime states. This is exactly the case where the federal number understates what you are owed.
- Does my salary mean I cannot claim overtime?
- Not by itself. Being paid a salary does not make you exempt; exemption depends on your duties and on meeting a salary threshold. Plenty of salaried people are owed overtime and do not claim it because they assume the salary settles it.