Free Overtime Pay Calculator

How overtime is actually calculated

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires covered, non-exempt employees to be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for every hour worked over 40 in a workweek. Each of those three phrases is a place where free calculators go wrong.

A workweek is a fixed, recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods. Your employer chooses when it starts; it need not match a calendar week or your pay period. Each week is settled on its own, so 30 hours one week and 50 the next inside one biweekly period is ten hours of overtime, not an average of 40.

“Worked” means time on the clock. Paid time off, holiday and sick pay are payment for hours not worked: paid, but never counted toward the 40-hour line. That is why leave hours get their own box above.

The regular rate is almost never your base rate

The regular rate is not a number an employer picks. It is computed fresh each week from what you earned:

regular rate = all straight-time earnings for the week ÷ all hours actually worked that week

Counted in the top of that fraction:

• hourly wages; shift, weekend and hazard differentials; on-call and show-up pay;
• commissions, whether paid this week or later; and
• nondiscretionary bonuses — production, attendance, safety, quality or retention bonuses, or anything announced in advance to get you to do something.

Left out of it:

• truly discretionary bonuses, where the payment and the amount are both decided at the end and nothing was promised;
• gifts, expense reimbursements, benefit-plan contributions, and pay for time not worked; and
• premium pay already paid at one and a half times for daily, weekend or holiday work, which is credited against overtime owed.

Straight time has already been paid for every hour on the clock, so what remains for overtime hours is the half-time premium: 0.5 × regular rate × overtime hours. Multiplying the base rate by 1.5 gives the same answer only in a week with no bonus, no differential and no commission.

A worked example

You earn $22.00 an hour. This week you worked 47 hours, 24 of them on a night shift paying $1.50 extra, and you hit a $100 attendance bonus promised at the start of the quarter.

• Straight time: 47 × $22.00 = $1,034.00
• Shift differential: 24 × $1.50 = $36.00
• Attendance bonus: $100.00
• Straight-time earnings: $1,170.00
• Regular rate: $1,170.00 ÷ 47 hours = $24.8936 an hour
• Overtime premium: 0.5 × $24.8936 × 7 hours = $87.13
• Gross for the week: $1,257.13

A calculator using 1.5 × the base rate would have said $1,247.00 — the same $1,170.00 of straight time plus a $77.00 premium. The gap is $10.13 a week, or $526.64 across a year of weeks like this one. The regular rate above is carried at full precision and rounded only when printed; rounding it to $24.89 first and then multiplying gives a different answer, which is how two people with the same numbers end up cents apart.

Salaried does not mean exempt

A salary is a way of paying someone, not a reason to withhold overtime. Exemption normally requires a job to clear both a salary-level test and a duties test, and the duties test is where most misclassification lives. If you are salaried and non-exempt, your regular rate is your weekly salary divided by the number of hours the salary is intended to compensate — 40 only if that is what your offer letter or your employer’s actual practice says. A salary written as covering 45 hours produces a lower regular rate and a smaller premium on hours 41 to 45, because straight time for those hours is already inside the salary.

The divisor is still the hours you actually worked, though, not the hours the salary was written to cover. In a week where a 55-hour salary of $275 buys only 50 hours of work, the regular rate for that week is $275 ÷ 50 = $5.50, not $5.00, and the premium is calculated on $5.50 (29 CFR 778.325). The fixed-rate version of that rule only applies where the employer docks your pay for the hours you did not work, which this calculator does not model.

Federal salary-level test: $684 per week ($35,568 a year), 29 CFR 541.600. The 2024 rule raising it to $844 and then $1,128 was vacated nationwide by a federal court in November 2024, so $684 is the figure in the regulations. Federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 24 July 2009. Both checked August 2026 — confirm at dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime first.

Daily overtime, and where it exists

Federal law has no daily overtime and no double time at all. California is the strictest widely-used exception: over 8 hours in a day at 1.5×, over 12 at 2×, and on the seventh consecutive day of a workweek the first 8 hours at 1.5× with everything after at 2×. Alaska, Nevada and Colorado set their own daily thresholds. California also divides a flat-sum bonus by non-overtime hours only rather than by all hours worked, producing a larger premium than the federal method. The California mode above applies both rules and never pays for the same hour twice.

California multiplies the regular rate too. Labor Code 510 says 1.5× and 2× the regular rate of pay, so a shift differential, a commission or a production bonus lifts every overtime and double-time hour exactly as it does under federal law. Enter them in the same box in either mode; only a flat-sum bonus gets the separate California divisor.

What free overtime calculators usually get wrong

• They multiply the base rate. Bonuses and differentials get added at the end, if at all, with no effect on the premium.
• They count PTO toward 40. That overstates overtime and convinces people they were shorted when they were not.
• They apply daily overtime everywhere. Paying 1.5× after 8 hours is simply wrong outside the few states that require it.
• They average two weeks in a biweekly period. That quietly erases overtime in an uneven period.
• They divide every salary by 40. If the salary covers a different number of hours, everything downstream changes.
• They round mid-calculation. Rounding the regular rate to cents before multiplying compounds the error through every later step.

To check the hours going in, use the time card calculator; to get a per-hour figure out of a salary, use the salary to hourly calculator.

What this tool does not model

It calculates gross pay for one workweek. Not modelled: tax withholding, deductions and garnishments; the fluctuating workweek method (29 CFR 778.114); California alternative workweek schedules; tip credits, piece rates and day rates; union contracts that beat the statutory minimum; the 7(k) rule for police and firefighters; and the 8/80 rule for hospitals. It also cannot decide whether you are exempt, because that turns on what you actually do all day. Treat the output as a documented estimate to take to payroll, your state labor agency, or the federal Wage and Hour Division.