Overtime Pay Calculator

The federal baseline is the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it is a weekly rule. Covered non exempt employees are owed at least one and a half times their regular rate for every hour worked beyond 40 in a workweek. The workweek is a fixed, recurring period of seven consecutive 24 hour days that your employer sets, and it does not have to line up with the calendar week or with your pay period.

Two details catch people out. The first is that overtime is based on your regular rate, not your base rate, and the regular rate includes things like nondiscretionary bonuses and shift differentials averaged across the hours you worked. If you earned a production bonus in a week with overtime, your overtime is worth slightly more than the quick calculation above. The second is that paid time off does not count toward the 40 hour threshold, because those hours were not worked. A week with eight hours of vacation and 36 hours at work is a 44 hour paycheck with no overtime in it.

This is where most overtime calculators get the answer wrong. Federal law has no daily rule at all, so a 12 hour Monday inside a 38 hour week earns no federal premium. Four states set their own daily thresholds on top of the weekly one, and where state law is more generous than federal law, the state rule is the one that applies to you.

California goes furthest. Beyond the eight and twelve hour thresholds, working a seventh consecutive day in the same workweek pays time and a half for the first eight hours and double time after that. Colorado applies its premium to whichever measure gives you the most overtime, counting 12 hours in a workday, 12 consecutive hours worked, or 40 hours in the week. Nevada applies its daily rule to employees under the state pay threshold, and Alaska keeps it simple at eight hours a day and 40 hours a week.

Switch the state selector in the calculator above and the form changes to a day by day timesheet, because in these states the shape of your week matters as much as the total. The tool classifies each day first, then tests whatever is left at the normal rate against the 40 hour weekly threshold, so no hour is ever counted as overtime twice.

The honest version of this answer is that it depends on your duties and your pay, not on your job title and not on whether you get a salary. Employees are either non exempt, which means overtime protections apply, or exempt, which means they do not. The common exemptions cover executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and certain computer roles, and they generally require both a salary at or above a set threshold and day to day duties that genuinely fit the category.

That last part is what employers get wrong most often. Giving someone the word manager in their title, or moving them from hourly pay to a salary, does not remove their right to overtime on its own. If the work is mostly routine and closely supervised rather than involving independent judgment or the direction of other people, the exemption may not hold however the pay is structured.

If you think you have been misclassified, the practical first step is to write down what you actually do on a normal week and how many hours it takes, then compare that against the exemption tests published by the US Department of Labor and by your state labor agency. The salary thresholds change from time to time, so check the current figure rather than one you remember.

Regular overtime changes your income more than most people expect. Five overtime hours a week at $22 an hour is $165 a week, which is about $8,580 across a full year, and it lands on top of a $45,760 base. That is why an hourly job with reliable overtime can out earn a salaried one that looks better on paper.

It cuts both ways. Overtime is rarely guaranteed, so treating it as permanent income when you are budgeting or applying for credit is risky. If you want the yearly picture with and without it, the hourly to salary calculator converts a rate plus weekly overtime hours into an annual figure. For the premium rate on its own, the time and a half calculator answers it in one step.