Holiday Pay Calculator

No, and this is the part most pages on the subject skip past. In the US there is no federal requirement for a private employer to pay extra for hours worked on a holiday, and no federal requirement to give paid holidays off in the first place. The Fair Labor Standards Act covers the minimum wage and overtime beyond 40 hours in a workweek. It says nothing about which days those hours fall on.

So holiday pay is a benefit, not an entitlement. It comes from your employer policy, your offer letter, or a union agreement, and the rate is whatever that document says it is. That is why the calculator above asks you what your employer pays rather than assuming a multiplier: the honest answer to what a holiday shift is worth depends on a policy, and only you can read yours.

Policies vary a lot, but they cluster into three shapes. Knowing which one you are under is enough to check a pay stub in a few seconds.

Two variations are worth knowing about. Some employers pay holiday pay for the day off and then pay again for the hours you work, which is the most generous arrangement in common use. Others offer a floating holiday you can take whenever you like, which is closer to paid time off than to a premium. If your policy mixes them, work out the pieces separately and add them together rather than trying to find one multiplier that covers everything.

There are eleven federal holidays. They are paid days off for federal employees, and they are the list most private employers borrow from when they write their own holiday schedule, even though they are free to choose a different set.

Most private holiday schedules are shorter than this list. New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas make up the core that turns up almost everywhere, and the rest depend on the industry. Retail, hospitality, healthcare, and transport tend to stay open on all of them, which is exactly why the premium question matters in those jobs.

They are separate calculations, and mixing them up is the most common error on a holiday paycheck. Overtime is owed on hours worked beyond 40 in the workweek. Holiday premiums come from your employer policy. A holiday shift can attract both, and when it does you apply the policy premium to the holiday hours and the overtime rules to the week as a whole.

The detail that surprises people is that holiday pay for a day you did not work does not count toward the 40 hour overtime threshold, because no hours were worked. Take a week with eight hours of holiday pay and 36 hours at work: the paycheck covers 44 hours, but only 36 were worked, so there is no overtime.

To work out a full week that includes both, run the holiday hours through the calculator above, then use the overtime pay calculator for the rest of the week, including the daily overtime rules if you work in California, Alaska, Nevada, or Colorado. If you only need the premium rate itself, the time and a half calculator gives it in one step.