Overtime Calculator

How overtime pay works

The federal rule is short. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, most employees who are covered must be paid 1.5 times their regular rate for every hour worked over 40 in a workweek. That is the whole calculation, and the US Department of Labor's overtime page states it in almost exactly those words.

Four details trip people up:

• The workweek is 168 fixed hours. It does not have to start on a Monday, but it must be a regular, recurring seven-day period. Each week is measured on its own, a 35-hour week and a 45-hour week do not average out to 40.
• The regular rate is not always your hourly rate. Non-discretionary bonuses, shift differentials and commissions are added into the total before the rate is divided out. Discretionary bonuses are excluded.
• Only hours over 40 count. Working 12 hours on Monday and 28 the rest of the week pays no overtime at all under federal law.
• Exempt is a two-part test. How you are paid and what you do both matter. The federal salary floor is $684 a week ($35,568 a year) and the job still has to pass a duties test.

The calculator above applies the federal rule and also lets you add double-time hours for the states that require them.

Worked example: $22 an hour, 48 hours

Straightforward week: $22 an hour, 48 hours worked.

• Straight time: 40 hours × $22 = $880
• Overtime: 8 hours × $33 (1.5 × $22) = $264
• Total gross: $880 + $264 = $1,144

Your effective hourly rate for that week is $1,144 ÷ 48 = $23.83, not $33. This is the number people get wrong. Overtime does not raise your whole week to time-and-a-half; it raises only the hours past 40, and then you divide by every hour you worked. The more overtime you add, the closer the average creeps toward $33 without reaching it.

Scale it out and 48 hours a week at $22 is $1,144 × 52 = $59,488 a year, before tax. Compare that to 40 hours a week, which is $880 × 52 = $45,760. The extra 8 hours a week, about 416 hours a year, are worth roughly $13,728, an average of $33 an hour, because every one of them is an overtime hour.

Worked example: a bonus raises your regular rate

Now the case most people miss. You earn $20 an hour, work 50 hours, and receive a $50 non-discretionary weekly bonus for hitting a production target.

You cannot just pay 10 overtime hours at $30 and add the bonus. The bonus is part of your remuneration, so it goes into the regular rate first:

• Total straight-time earnings: 50 × $20 = $1,000
• Plus the bonus: $1,000 + $50 = $1,050
• Regular rate: $1,050 ÷ 50 hours = $21.00
• Overtime premium: 0.5 × $21.00 × 10 hours = $105
• Total pay: $1,050 + $105 = $1,155

If the bonus had been ignored, you would have been paid $1,000 + $150 = $1,150, $5 short. It looks small on one week, but the same error repeated for a year is about $260, and it is the kind of mistake that turns into a wage claim when it is systematic. This is exactly why the calculator has a bonus field: the regular rate, not the advertised hourly rate, is what the law multiplies.

Overtime pay at a glance

Weekly gross pay at four common rates, with everything over 40 hours paid at 1.5 times the base rate and no bonuses involved:

Notice the pattern: every overtime hour adds 1.5 × the base rate, so each extra 5-hour block past 40 is worth 5 × 1.5 × rate. At $20 an hour that is $150 per five-hour block, which is why the jump from 40 to 60 hours ($600) is so much bigger than the jump from 40 to 45. For context on what different occupations typically pay, the Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data publishes median hourly wages by occupation.

States that go further: daily overtime and double time

Federal law sets a floor, not a ceiling, and several states require more. The best-known is California, which pays:

• 1.5 times after 8 hours in a single day
• 2 times after 12 hours in a single day
• 1.5 times for the first 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day worked, and 2 times after that

Work a 13-hour day at $30 an hour in California and you earn 8 × $30 + 4 × $45 + 1 × $60 = $480 for the day. Flat rate would have paid $390. Over a five-day week of 13-hour days, the difference is $450, which is why the daily rules matter more than they look.

Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon also have daily or weekly overtime variants, and a few states have their own minimum salary thresholds for exemption. If you work in one of those states, set the multiplier to 1.5 and put your over-12 hours into the double-time field, and check the state labor office for the exact rule that applies to you.

Salary, exemption and getting paid correctly

Being salaried does not automatically mean you are exempt from overtime. Two tests have to be satisfied: the salary basis and level, and the duties test. Federally, the salary floor is $684 a week, or $35,568 a year. Above that, your job still has to be genuinely executive, administrative, professional, computer or outside sales, and job titles do not decide it, actual duties do.

If you think you are owed overtime, the practical steps are: keep your own record of hours worked each day, keep the pay stubs, and put the question in writing. The IRS Publication 15 explains how overtime must be reported and withheld on the employer's side, which is useful if you need to show that a payment was mislabelled.

Two warnings worth stating plainly. First, this calculator gives you an arithmetic estimate from the numbers you enter, it does not know your state, your exemption status or your contract, so treat the result as a starting point and confirm the rule with your state labor office or an employment lawyer if real money is at stake. Second, an employer cannot average two weeks together to dodge overtime, and cannot ask you to work "off the clock". Those are violations, not loopholes.