What Actually Counts as Overtime (and What Does Not)

The rule is narrower than almost everyone thinks

Ask around and you will hear that overtime is what you get for working late, or for working a Saturday, or for working through a public holiday. Under US federal law none of those is true on its own. The Fair Labor Standards Act says that unless you are exempt, you must be paid at least one and a half times your regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek. That is the entire trigger. Not the length of the day, not which day it was.

The Department of Labor is explicit that the Act does not require overtime for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays or regular days of rest, unless overtime is actually worked on those days. A twelve hour Sunday in a week where you total 38 hours earns no federal overtime at all. A quiet Tuesday that takes you from 39 to 41 hours earns an hour of it.

There is also no federal cap on hours. The Act sets no limit on how many hours an employee aged 16 or over may work in a workweek. It only sets the price of the hours past 40. People often assume there is a legal maximum somewhere. Federally, there is not.

The workweek is a fixed thing, and that matters more than it sounds

The FLSA works on a workweek basis, and the DOL defines a workweek as a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours, meaning seven consecutive 24 hour periods. It does not have to match the calendar week. It can start on any day, at any hour, and different groups of employees can be on different workweeks.

The part that catches employers out is this: averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. If someone works 50 hours one week and 30 the next, that is 10 hours of overtime plus a short week. It is not 80 hours averaged to two normal weeks. This comes up constantly with fortnightly or semi-monthly pay periods, because the pay period and the workweek are different things and the overtime is calculated on the workweek regardless of how often you run payroll.

It also means the boundary matters. A shift that starts at 22:00 on Saturday and ends at 06:00 on Sunday may fall across two workweeks depending on where you set the line, which changes which week the hours land in. If you are totalling shifts by hand this is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong quietly, which is why the time card calculator adds the 24 hours when an end time is earlier than a start time rather than treating a night shift as negative hours.

Salaried does not mean exempt

This is the most expensive misunderstanding in the whole subject. Paying someone a salary does not, by itself, remove the right to overtime. Exemption from the executive, administrative and professional categories requires the salary to clear a threshold and the job duties to genuinely match the exemption. Both. A salaried employee whose actual work does not meet the duties test is owed overtime no matter what the contract calls them.

On the money side, the current standard salary level published by the DOL is $684 per week, equivalent to $35,568 a year. There is a separate route for highly compensated employees at $107,432 a year, which still requires at least $684 a week paid on a salary or fee basis. Computer employees paid hourly have their own figure of $27.63 an hour.

It is worth knowing that this threshold has been genuinely turbulent. A large increase was introduced and then vacated in litigation, which is why the current figure is lower than a lot of articles written in the last two years will tell you. If you are relying on it for a real decision, check the DOL's own page on the day you need it rather than trusting any secondary source, this one included.

The thresholds also do not apply to certain roles at all, including doctors, lawyers, teachers and outside sales employees. And to convert between a salary and the hourly figure the threshold is expressed in, the salary converter will do the arithmetic, though it will not tell you whether the duties test is met, which is the half that actually decides it.

Your regular rate is probably not your hourly rate

Overtime is one and a half times the regular rate, and the regular rate is not simply the number on the offer letter. It includes most forms of compensation for the hours worked, which importantly includes nondiscretionary bonuses: production bonuses, attendance bonuses, anything promised in advance to induce the work.

A worked example. Someone paid $20 an hour works 45 hours and earns a $100 production bonus that week. The bonus is spread across the hours worked, adding $2.22 an hour, so the regular rate becomes $22.22. The five overtime hours are paid at $33.33 rather than $30. The difference is small per week and not small per year, and it is the sort of thing that turns up in a back pay claim years later with interest attached.

Genuinely discretionary bonuses, the kind decided after the fact with no promise beforehand, are treated differently and generally stay out of the regular rate. The line between the two is narrower than most employers assume, and "we do it every year" starts to look a lot like a promise.

Where state law changes the answer

Everything above is the federal floor. States can and do go further, and where they do, the more generous rule wins.

California is the one most people run into. It requires overtime after 8 hours in a single day, not just 40 in a week, double time after 12 hours in a day, and additional rules for the seventh consecutive day in a workweek. A ten hour Monday in California earns two hours of overtime even in a week that totals 35 hours, which would earn nothing federally. Alaska, Nevada and Colorado have their own daily rules, and several states set higher salary thresholds for exemption than the federal one.

Outside the US the framework is different again. The UK has no statutory overtime premium at all: unless the contract provides for it, extra hours are simply paid at the normal rate, and the binding constraint is the working time rules on average weekly hours rather than a pay multiplier. Australia runs overtime through modern awards and enterprise agreements, so the multiplier depends on which award covers the role. If you are working out pay across borders, the answer genuinely changes country by country, and a US calculator is a starting point rather than an authority.

That is why the daily threshold and the multiplier are editable fields in the time card calculator rather than constants. A tool that hardcodes 40 and 1.5 is quietly wrong for every Californian who uses it.

The things that go wrong in practice

Unrecorded work is the biggest one. Time spent on required tasks before clocking in, answering messages after hours, or working through an unpaid break is generally hours worked, and hours worked count toward the 40 whether or not anyone recorded them. "We did not authorise it" is a reason to discipline someone, not a reason to withhold pay for it.

Comp time is the second. In the private sector, offering time off in a later week instead of paying overtime is generally not permitted under the FLSA, because it is averaging across weeks by another name. Public sector employers have a specific carve out for this. Private ones mostly do not.

Misclassifying employees as contractors is the third and most expensive. Calling someone a contractor does not make them one, and if the working relationship looks like employment, the overtime obligation was there all along. If you are the contractor in that arrangement, the freelance rate calculator is a useful reality check on whether your rate actually covers what you gave up, because self employment tax and unpaid overtime both come out of the same number.

The last one is expenses rather than hours, but it lands in the same paycheck. Business mileage is not overtime, but it is money owed, and the IRS split its 2026 standard rate mid year, which means a single average rate quietly overpays one half of the year and underpays the other. The mileage reimbursement calculator handles both halves separately for that reason.