Overtime is counted by the week, and most people count it by the day
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires one and a half times the regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek. That's the entire federal trigger. Federal law has no overtime for long days, weekends, nights or holidays.
That catches people off guard every week. Four 10-hour days add up to 40 hours, so no overtime. A 12-hour Saturday in a 38-hour week: no overtime. Two 16-hour shifts and three days off make 32 hours, and again no overtime. Five 8.5-hour days feel ordinary, yet they total 42.5 hours and produce 2.5 overtime hours.
Time and a half for weekends and holidays does exist. It comes from employer policy or a collective bargaining agreement, though, and the FLSA has nothing to do with it. If your employer pays it, that's a benefit they chose. If they stop paying it, the law won't step in unless the hours pushed the week past 40.
Your overtime regular rate is not the number on your offer letter
Overtime is a multiple of the regular rate, which is total pay for the workweek divided by total hours worked. Paid a flat hourly wage and nothing else? Then the regular rate equals the wage and nobody notices the difference. Add any other pay and the two numbers split apart.
Fold these into the regular rate before you apply the multiplier:
- Nondiscretionary bonuses, such as attendance, production, safety, or any bonus announced in advance to encourage a behavior. If employees could see it coming, it counts.
- Shift differentials, the extra paid for nights or weekends.
- Most commissions, whether they're paid weekly or spread over a longer period and then allocated back.
- On-call pay and hazard pay, in most arrangements.
You can leave out bonuses that were truly discretionary and decided after the fact, gifts, reimbursed expenses, premium pay already paid at 1.5× for weekend or holiday work, and most benefit contributions.
Run the numbers once and it sticks. Take $20 an hour, 45 hours worked and a $90 production bonus for the week. Straight-time pay is $900, plus the $90 bonus, so the regular rate is $990 ÷ 45 = $22. The five overtime hours were already paid at straight time inside that $990. What's left is the half-time premium: 5 × $22 × 0.5 = $55. The correct total is $1,045. An employer who applies 1.5 × $20 to five hours and tacks the bonus on separately lands at $1,040. That's five dollars short, every week, on one employee.
Exempt from overtime is a three-part test, and the job title isn't one of them
Plenty of people searching for an overtime calculator don't need arithmetic. They need to know whether they're owed anything at all. Exempt employees get no overtime however many hours they work, and the line is drawn by three conditions that all have to be met.
| Test | What it requires |
|---|---|
| Salary basis | A set amount each pay period that doesn't shrink because of the quantity or quality of the work. |
| Salary level | At least $684 a week ($35,568 a year) under the federal floor, with a separate highly compensated employee route at $107,432 a year. |
| Duties | Primary duties that fit the executive, administrative, professional, computer or outside sales definitions, as the work is actually done and not as the job description reads. |
The salary level has been fought over. A 2024 Department of Labor rule would have raised it to $1,128 a week, but a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated that rule nationwide in November 2024, which put the 2019 figure of $684 back in place. Several states set their own, higher floors. California ties its threshold to twice the state minimum wage for full-time work, New York varies its threshold by region, and the higher number governs where it applies.
Most misclassification happens on the duties test. Calling someone an "assistant manager" doesn't make them exempt if they spend the shift stocking shelves and running a register. Paying a salary doesn't make them exempt either. It covers one of the three conditions and nothing more.
State overtime rules that go further than federal law
The FLSA is a floor, and several states build on top of it. California is the one to learn in detail, because its rules run daily as well as weekly.
- California pays 1.5× past 8 hours in a day and past 40 in a week, and 2× past 12 hours in a day. On the seventh consecutive day of a workweek it's 1.5× for the first 8 hours and 2× beyond that.
- Alaska and Nevada have daily overtime past 8 hours, with conditions.
- Colorado pays it past 12 hours in a day, or past 12 consecutive hours of work regardless of when the workday began.
- Puerto Rico has daily overtime with its own structure.
Where a state has daily overtime, hours already counted as daily overtime don't count again toward the weekly 40-hour trigger. Counting them twice inflates the paycheck on paper, and it's a common spreadsheet error. Switch the calculator above to the California rule and the same four 10-hour days that owe nothing federally produce seven hours of daily overtime.
Your workweek is a fixed 168 hours, and where it starts changes overtime
A workweek is any fixed, regularly recurring period of seven consecutive 24-hour days. The employer picks the start, and once picked it has to stay put. Nobody gets to slide it around to dodge a threshold. It doesn't have to match the pay period, either. An employer who pays every two weeks still owes overtime week by week, and can't average 50 hours and 30 hours into two tidy 40s.
The boundary has real consequences. If the workweek runs Sunday to Saturday, a Saturday night shift that ends at 2am on Sunday splits across two workweeks, and its hours land on either side of two separate 40-hour thresholds. You lose nothing. But the week that gets the tail may cross 40 while the other doesn't, so a pay stub that looks short may be right. Before you assume an error, ask which day your workweek starts. Employers are required to have a fixed answer.
Hours worked means all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work. That includes off-the-clock work the employer knows about, short rest breaks under 20 minutes, and required travel between job sites during the day. Ordinary commuting doesn't count. Neither does a bona fide meal break of 30 minutes or more that is entirely free from duty.
Where overtime pay quietly goes wrong
- Bonuses left out of the regular rate. This is the most common underpayment, and it compounds silently across every overtime hour in the period.
- Two pay rates at one employer. Someone working two jobs at different rates for the same employer has a regular rate that is the weighted average of both, unless a specific written agreement says otherwise.
- Unpaid work before and after the shift: booting a terminal, counting a till, putting on required gear. Fifteen minutes a day is 1.25 hours a week, which is often exactly what crosses 40.
- Comp time at a private company. Time off in place of overtime money isn't lawful for private employers, however much both sides like the idea.
- Paid leave counted as hours worked. Holiday, vacation and sick hours usually are not hours worked for the 40-hour trigger, so a week with 8 hours of holiday and 36 hours worked is 44 paid hours and zero overtime hours.
What this overtime calculator can and cannot see
It applies the federal weekly rule and, if you choose, the California daily rules. It builds the regular rate from the pay you enter, including other weekly pay that belongs in it. It shows the premium apart from straight time, so you can check the number against a pay stub line by line.
It doesn't know your state's thresholds beyond California, your union contract, your employer's chosen workweek, or the exclusions your particular bonus might qualify for. The result is gross pay before taxes, garnishments and deductions. Use it as an arithmetic check on what you were paid. For a real dispute, go to your state labor agency or the federal Wage and Hour Division. Both investigate unpaid overtime free of charge.
Privacy
Every calculation runs in your browser. Your wage, hours and bonus are never uploaded, logged or stored, and there's no account. That matters more here than on most tools, because what you type is evidence about your own job.
Frequently asked questions
Do I get overtime for working more than 8 hours in a day?
Not under federal law. The Fair Labor Standards Act counts hours in the workweek, and the length of a single day doesn't matter to it. Work four 10-hour days and stop, and you have 40 hours with no overtime owed, long as each day was. Some states do have daily overtime. California pays 1.5× past 8 hours in a day and 2× past 12, and a union contract can require daily overtime anywhere. Without a state rule or a contract, the 40-hour weekly total is the only trigger.
Is my overtime calculated on my hourly rate?
Not quite. It's calculated on your regular rate: total pay for the week divided by hours worked. Nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, production bonuses and most commissions go into that total first. Say you earn $20 an hour and got a $90 attendance bonus in a 45-hour week. Your regular rate is $22, and the overtime premium runs on $22. An employer who uses the $20 base rate underpays every overtime hour.
Can my employer average two weeks together to avoid overtime?
No. Each workweek stands on its own. A 50-hour week followed by a 30-hour week means 10 hours of overtime plus a short week. It never becomes two 40-hour weeks. The usual exceptions are certain hospital and residential care employees under the FLSA's 8-and-80 rule, plus some public safety and firefighting schedules, and all of them need specific agreements.
Can I take comp time instead of overtime pay?
In the private sector, generally not. The FLSA says overtime is paid in money, in the pay period when it was earned. A private employer can't swap that money for paid time off, even when the employee would rather have the time. Public agencies are the exception. State and local government employers may give compensatory time at 1.5 hours per overtime hour, capped at 240 hours for most employees and 480 for public safety and emergency response.
Does being paid a salary mean I am exempt from overtime?
No, and this mistake costs more money than any other in overtime. Salary is how you get paid. Exempt is a legal status, and it has three separate requirements: the salary basis, a salary at or above the federal floor of $684 a week, and job duties that really fit the executive, administrative, professional, computer or outside sales tests. Fail any one and the employee is non-exempt and owed overtime, whatever the job title says.