Last checked 2026-11-07. Federal rules change — always confirm on the official pages linked below.
Work out what an hour of overtime is actually worth to you with the calculator on this page — the gross rate is only half the story.
The FLSA requires overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek, at not less than time and one-half the regular rate (DOL Fact Sheet #23).
The "regular rate" is not necessarily your hourly rate if you are paid a salary or a day rate — it is the rate the law calculates from your pay. The DOL notes it cannot be less than the minimum wage.
That is the whole rule. Most disputes turn on one of these four words: hours, worked, workweek, or regular rate.
Employers often get this wrong, sometimes honestly.
The workweek is "a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours". It does not have to start on Sunday or Monday, and it does not have to match the calendar month. But "averaging of hours over two or more weeks is not permitted."
So a schedule that runs 50 hours one week and 30 the next is 50 hours of work in the first week, not 40 hours on average. Forty of those hours are straight time and ten are overtime.
This surprises people, and it cuts both ways.
The law "does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest." Working Sunday is not automatically worth 1.5×. What makes it overtime is that it pushed you past 40 hours that week.
The flip side: an employer can pay a premium for weekends — some do — but that is a policy or a contract, not the federal minimum.
Suppose your regular rate is $20 an hour and you work 45 hours in a workweek.
Note what the overtime is not. It is not 45 hours at $30, and it is not a flat $30 for the whole day you stayed late. The premium applies only to the hours past the fortieth, which is why a 45-hour week does not feel like a 12.5% raise even though your hours went up by 12.5%.
There is a lot of folklore here, so it is worth being precise.
The white-collar exemptions "apply only to 'white-collar' employees who meet the salary and duties tests." The salary floor is $684 a week, and there is a higher total-compensation test at $107,432 for certain highly paid employees (DOL Fact Sheet #17A, revised 2019). Confirm the current threshold on the DOL's page before you rely on it.
Three things the DOL says plainly, which between them cover most of the confusion:
That last one is worth reading twice, because "salaried" and "exempt" get used as if they were the same word. They are not.
The overtime requirement "may not be waived by agreement between the employer and employees" (DOL).
In practice that means an employment contract, a handbook clause, or a verbal understanding that you will not claim overtime does not make it lawful. It is a right the law gives, not a term the parties negotiate.
Whether raising it is a good idea for your particular job is a different question, and not one a website can answer for you.
Here is the part nobody puts on the poster.
The 1.5× applies to the hours you worked past 40 — not to your whole week. That is why a 45-hour week does not raise your gross pay by 50%: forty hours are paid at straight time and five at the premium. On a $20 regular rate, that is $950 for the week against $800, a rise of 18.75% — hours up 12.5%, gross up 18.75%, and average pay per hour up from $20 to $21.11.
Take a simple case for the 2026 tax year: a single filer earning $60,000, taking the standard deduction, with $5,000 of overtime in the year. The extra $5,000 is wages, so it carries the same deductions as the rest of your pay — federal income tax at your marginal rate, plus Social Security at 6.2% and Medicare at 1.45% (IRS).
$60,000 − $16,100 = $43,900 of taxable income. Add $5,000 and you are at $48,900, still below the 2026 12% cap of $50,400. So the extra is taxed at 12% plus 7.65% for FICA — 19.65% in total — leaving $4,017.50. That is before any state income tax.
Note what that does not mean. Each overtime hour still pays about 1.5× what a normal hour would have paid you after tax — the deductions are proportional, so they do not eat the premium. What shrinks is the bonus, not the ratio: about four fifths of the extra money survives the federal deductions.
The calculator on this page takes a salary, not an overtime entry. To use it here: put your base salary in, note the take-home; then put salary plus expected overtime in and compare the two. The difference is what the extra hours are worth after tax.
Updated 2026-11-07 · Sources retrieved 2026-11-07.
This is a general explanation of federal rules, not legal or tax advice, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own job. Employment questions are fact-specific — if you think you are owed overtime, ask the Department of Labor or a lawyer.
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