Overtime Pay Calculator

How overtime pay is built

Overtime pay rewards hours worked beyond the regular week with a premium rate: most commonly time-and-a-half, one and a half times your normal hourly rate, and in some jobs double time, twice the normal rate, for hours such as Sundays, holidays or very long shifts. This calculator is a weekly tool: enter your hourly rate, your regular hours, and how many hours fall at each premium, and it builds your gross weekly pay line by line — regular pay, the overtime slice and the double-time slice — plus a blended hourly rate that shows what the week really paid per hour, and an annual figure if every week looked like this one. It is gross pay, before tax and deductions; for the take-home side, run the resulting income through the Salary Calculator or the Paycheck Calculator.

The overtime formulas

The 40-hour threshold — general information

In the United States, the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) generally requires covered, non-exempt employees to be paid at least time-and-a-half for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. That statement carries all of its qualifiers deliberately, and they matter. The FLSA does not generally require overtime pay merely for working weekends, nights or holidays as such — the trigger is the weekly total, unless a contract, company policy or state law says more. Many states and employers do say more: some require daily overtime beyond a set number of hours in a day, some require double time in defined situations, and collective bargaining agreements often improve on every floor the law sets. Exempt employees — a legal category covering many salaried professional, executive and administrative roles, defined by duties and salary tests rather than by job title alone — are generally outside the FLSA overtime requirement altogether. This page provides general educational information about how the arithmetic works, not legal advice and not a ruling on your own job: your payslip, your contract, your state's rules and, if it comes to it, an employment professional are the authorities for what you are owed.

Worked example

At $25 an hour with a 40-hour regular week, regular pay is 40 × $25 = $1,000. Add 5 overtime hours at time-and-a-half: each is paid at $25 × 1.5 = $37.50, adding 5 × $37.50 = $187.50. With no double-time hours, gross weekly pay is $1,000 + $187.50 = $1,187.50 for 45 hours — a blended rate of about $26.39 an hour, noticeably above the base $25, which is exactly what the premium is for. If those five hours had instead been double time, they would have added $250 and taken the week to $1,250. Repeated every week for a year, the default week annualises to $1,187.50 × 52 = $61,750 — a useful figure for comparing an hourly role with overtime against a salaried offer, provided the overtime is genuinely regular rather than occasional.

Checking your payslip with this calculator

The fastest payslip check is to reconstruct the week from your own record of hours before looking at the money. Count your hours in the employer's defined workweek — which may start on any day, not necessarily Monday — and split them into regular, time-and-a-half and double time according to the rules that apply to your job. Multiply out each slice with the formulas above and compare the total with the gross on the slip. Small differences usually trace back to rounding, a workweek boundary splitting a shift, or unpaid meal breaks rather than to the rate itself. A large or repeated difference is worth a polite, documented question to payroll: bring your hour record, your calculation, and the specific weeks in question, because a conversation about arithmetic resolves far more easily than a conversation about fairness.

Worked example

At $25 an hour: 40 regular hours pay $1,000, 5 hours at time-and-a-half ($37.50 each) add $187.50, and with no double time the gross week is $1,187.50 — $61,750 a year if every week matched.

How to use this calculator

1. Enter your normal hourly rate — the base rate before any premium.
2. Enter your regular hours for the week, usually 40.
3. Enter how many hours were paid at time-and-a-half (1.5x), and how many at double time (2x), in the same week.
4. Read the gross weekly pay and the breakdown, then check the blended hourly rate and the annualised x52 figure in the statistics.
5. Compare the result with your payslip for the same workweek; if they differ, check the workweek boundary and unpaid breaks before the rates.

Salaried, exempt and other pay shapes

Not every job's overtime can be reconstructed from an hourly rate, because not every job has one in the relevant sense. Salaried non-exempt employees may have their weekly salary converted to an effective hourly rate — typically the salary divided by the hours the salary is intended to cover — with the premium owed on hours beyond the threshold. Employees paid piece rates, day rates or multiple rates for different duties have their own regular-rate calculations under the rules that apply to them, generally built on total earnings divided by total hours. And exempt employees, as described above, are usually owed no overtime premium at all under the FLSA, however long the week runs — though a contract or employer policy may still provide one voluntarily. If your pay shape is one of these, treat this page as the arithmetic for the premium itself once an hourly basis is established, and get the basis itself from your contract or payslip.

Overtime and your wider budget

Irregular overtime is a budgeting trap: it arrives in busy seasons, feels permanent while it lasts, and vanishes without notice. The households that handle it best bank it rather than absorb it — regular spending is built on the regular-hours pay alone, and overtime goes to goals, debt payoff or savings, where a quiet month cannot turn it into a crisis. The annualised figure in the statistics is deliberately labelled as conditional: it shows what a year of identical weeks would pay, which is a comparison tool for job offers, not a promise about any real year. If overtime is a steady part of your income rather than an occasional boost, that pattern — how many weeks a year actually include it — is the honest multiplier to use.

Frequently asked questions