How Does Overtime Work? Eligibility, Pay Rules, and Hours

Overtime works like this: under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, if you are a covered employee, your employer owes you at least 1.5 times your regular hourly rate for every hour you work beyond 40 in a single workweek.¹ Whether you’re covered depends on two things: how much you earn and what you actually do all day. Hourly workers almost always qualify. Salaried workers sometimes do and sometimes don’t. And the calculation itself is not always the simple “wage times 1.5” that people assume.

Who Gets Overtime and Who Doesn’t

The FLSA sorts workers into two buckets: non-exempt employees, who are entitled to overtime, and exempt employees, who aren’t. Non-exempt is the default. You qualify for overtime unless your employer can prove you fit inside a specific exemption.²

Being paid a salary does not, by itself, make you exempt. That’s one of the most common misunderstandings in wage law. To classify you as exempt, an employer has to satisfy two separate tests.

The Salary Test

You must earn at least $684 per week — $35,568 per year — on a salary basis.³ Earn less than that, and you’re non-exempt no matter what your title says or what work you perform.

The Department of Labor tried to raise this threshold in 2024, first to $844 per week and then to $1,128 per week starting in January 2025. A federal court in Texas vacated the rule in November 2024, and the Department reverted to the 2019 figure of $684 for enforcement.³ That $684 is what’s currently enforceable.

Salary basis also means your pay is a predetermined, fixed amount that doesn’t rise or fall based on the quality or quantity of your work in a given week. If your employer docks your salary when you put in fewer hours, that fluctuating pay can knock out the exemption altogether.

The Duties Test

Clearing the salary bar isn’t enough. Your primary job duties also have to fall into one of the recognized exempt categories. The three main ones are executive, administrative, and professional.²

Executive: your primary duty is managing a department or subdivision, and you regularly direct the work of at least two full-time employees.
Administrative: your primary duty is office or non-manual work directly related to business operations or management, and you regularly exercise independent judgment on significant matters.
Professional: your primary duty requires advanced knowledge in a specialized field, typically gained through extended education, such as law, medicine, engineering, or accounting.

Job titles don’t decide anything. A “manager” who spends most of the day doing the same tasks as the workers underneath them may fail the executive duties test. What matters is the actual work.

Two narrower exemptions come up often. Employees earning at least $107,432 per year (with at least $684 of that paid weekly on a salary basis) face a lighter duties test: they’re exempt if they regularly perform even one duty of an executive, administrative, or professional employee.⁴ And certain technology workers — systems analysts, programmers, software engineers — can qualify for a separate exemption if paid at least $27.63 per hour or the standard salary threshold, provided the work involves designing, developing, testing, or documenting systems or programs.⁵ Help desk staff and hardware repair workers generally don’t fit.

How Overtime Pay Is Calculated

Overtime is 1.5 times your “regular rate” for each hour past 40 in the workweek.¹ The regular rate is not always the same as your base hourly wage. It’s your total straight-time compensation for the week divided by the total hours you worked.

Here’s how that plays out. Say you earn $20 per hour and pick up a $100 production bonus in a week where you work 50 hours. Straight-time pay is $1,000, plus the $100 bonus, for $1,100 total. Divide $1,100 by 50 hours and your regular rate for the week is $22. The overtime premium is half that rate — $11 — for each of the 10 overtime hours, adding $110 on top of the $1,100 you already earned. Total for the week: $1,210.

Bonuses That Count Toward the Regular Rate

Nondiscretionary bonuses have to be folded into the regular rate. Discretionary bonuses don’t. A bonus is discretionary only if the employer decides both whether to pay it and how much, entirely on their own, with no prior promise or arrangement that would lead you to expect it.⁶

Bonuses that must be included include production bonuses paid on a formula, attendance bonuses, safety bonuses, and bonuses announced in advance to encourage efficient work.⁶ Even if the employer technically reserves the right to skip a promised bonus, that alone doesn’t make it discretionary. The real question is whether employees know about it and expect it.

Payments the Employer Can Leave Out

Federal law lists payments an employer doesn’t have to include in the regular rate:¹

Gifts and special-occasion payments not tied to hours, production, or efficiency.
Vacation, holiday, and sick pay for time not worked.
Truly discretionary bonuses.
Employer contributions to retirement plans, health insurance, or similar benefits.
Reasonable reimbursements for travel or other business expenses.
Premium pay already provided at 1.5 times or more for daily overtime, weekly overtime, or weekend and holiday work.

If your employer leaves out a payment that should have been included, every overtime check is short. Those shortfalls add up quickly.

What Counts as Hours Worked

The workweek is a fixed, recurring 168-hour period — seven consecutive 24-hour days.⁷ It doesn’t have to start Monday or match the calendar. Whatever start point the employer picks stays fixed.

Each workweek stands alone. Your employer can’t average hours across two weeks to duck overtime. Work 50 hours one week and 30 the next, and you’re still owed 10 hours of overtime for the first, even though your two-week average is 40.

Compensable time — the time that counts toward the 40-hour threshold — includes required training, mandatory meetings, travel between job sites during the workday, and preparatory tasks like setting up equipment.⁸ Changing into required protective gear or cleaning specialized tools at shift’s end generally counts too. If a supervisor lets you or requires you to work through lunch, that time counts.

On-call time depends on how restricted you are. If you must stay on the employer’s premises while waiting, that time is compensable — you’re “engaged to wait.”⁸ If you’re on call at home and free to use the time as you like as long as you can be reached, generally it isn’t. The more your employer restricts you — tight response windows, small geographic areas — the more likely on-call time becomes compensable.

Very brief, hard-to-measure work periods may fall under the de minimis rule.⁹ That rule only applies to genuinely uncertain, brief time. Employers can’t stretch it to cover work time that can reasonably be tracked, and rounding practices are acceptable only if they don’t consistently shortchange employees over time.

Can Your Employer Force You to Work Overtime?

Federal law sets no cap on how many hours an adult can work in a day or a week.¹ As long as your employer pays the required overtime premium, they can require 50, 60, or more hours a week. Under at-will employment, refusing scheduled overtime can end in termination in most situations.

Exceptions cluster in safety-sensitive industries. Federal regulations limit consecutive work hours for truck drivers, airline pilots, and certain healthcare workers to reduce fatigue-related accidents. Some states impose additional hour limits in specific industries. Outside those categories, capping hours is up to the employer and any contract or collective bargaining agreement.

State Rules Can Give You More

Federal law is the floor. Some states go further. A handful require overtime based on daily hours: more than eight hours in one day triggers overtime pay even if you stay at or below 40 for the week. A small number of states also set higher salary thresholds for exemption than the federal $684 per week, running up to roughly $80,000 per year in the most protective jurisdictions. When both federal and state rules apply, your employer follows whichever is more favorable to you.

What to Do If You’re Not Paid the Overtime You’re Owed

You can recover the unpaid wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages — effectively doubling what’s owed.¹⁰ Courts may also award reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. An employer avoids liquidated damages only by proving they acted in good faith and had reasonable grounds to believe they were complying with the law. Some states allow higher multipliers under their own wage-and-hour laws, reaching two or three times the unpaid amount.

You generally have two years from each missed payment to file a federal claim. If the violation was willful — the employer knew or should have known they were breaking the law — the deadline extends to three years.¹¹ Because the clock runs from each individual paycheck, older violations can expire while more recent ones stay actionable. Filing sooner preserves more of your potential recovery.

To file a wage complaint, contact the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division at 1-866-487-9243.¹² Complaints are confidential; the Division won’t disclose your name or even confirm that a complaint exists to your employer. You can also file a private lawsuit in federal or state court, individually or with similarly affected coworkers.¹⁰

Federal law also prohibits your employer from firing, demoting, or otherwise punishing you for filing a wage complaint, taking part in an investigation, or testifying in a related proceeding.¹³ If retaliation happens, you can seek reinstatement, lost wages, and liquidated damages through the Wage and Hour Division or a private lawsuit.¹⁴

One practical note about proof: employers must keep accurate payroll records for non-exempt workers, including hours worked each day and each week, for at least three years.¹⁵ If they don’t and a dispute arises, courts tend to accept the employee’s reasonable estimates rather than side with the employer who failed to track time properly. Keep your own record of hours if you can — schedules, texts about start and end times, notes at the end of each day. It’s the strongest thing you can bring to any claim.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 207 – Maximum Hours
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 213 – Exemptions
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Earnings Thresholds for the Executive, Administrative, and Professional Exemption
4
U.S. Department of Labor. FLSA Overtime Security Advisor – Highly Compensated
5
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 17E – Exemption for Employees in Computer-Related Occupations
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 56C – Bonuses Under the FLSA
7
eCFR. 29 CFR 778.105 – Determining the Workweek
8
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the FLSA
9
U.S. Department of Labor. FLSA Hours Worked Advisor – Recording Hours Worked
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 216 – Penalties
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations
12
U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a Complaint
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 215 – Prohibited Acts
14
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 77A – Prohibiting Retaliation Under the FLSA
15
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 21 – Recordkeeping Requirements Under the FLSA