Overtime is where a payroll mistake costs the most, because the rules are not what most people assume. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, a non-exempt employee must be paid at least one and a half times the regular rate for hours over forty in a workweek. The regular rate is not the same as the base hourly rate. This group of tools is built around that difference.
The overtime calculator starts by asking whether the employee is exempt, because exempt employees are not owed overtime under the federal rule and a calculation for them is meaningless. If the employee is non-exempt, it works out the regular rate from everything the pay includes. Non-discretionary bonuses, shift differentials and commissions are part of the regular rate. When an employee works at two different rates in the same week, the regular rate is the weighted average of the two. The result is shown as a labelled figure so you can see how the overtime rate was reached.
A worked example shows why it matters. An employee works 45 hours at $20 an hour and earns a $100 production bonus. Straight-time earnings are 45 times $20 plus $100, which is $1,000. Divided by 45 hours, the regular rate is $22.22. The five overtime hours are owed an extra half of that rate, which is $55.56 on top of straight time. A calculator that multiplies five hours by one and a half times the $20 base rate leaves the bonus out of the overtime rate, and the employee is underpaid.
The workweek is the other rule that catches people. It is a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour days, and it may start on any day and hour. Overtime is counted for each workweek on its own. The Department of Labor states that averaging hours over two or more weeks is not permitted. The calculator therefore works week by week even when your pay period is two weeks or half a month.
Some states add rules of their own. California counts daily overtime: one and a half times the regular rate after eight hours in a day, double time after twelve hours in a day, and special rates on the seventh consecutive day of a workweek. The calculator has a state selector that changes the arithmetic, not only a label. It starts with the federal rule and California, and other states are added only after their rules are checked against that state’s own labor department.
The annual salary calculator covers the other half of the question. It converts hourly, weekly, monthly and yearly pay into each other and shows take-home pay for an employee, and it can also show the true cost of a wage to the employer: the wage plus the employer share of Social Security and Medicare, federal and state unemployment tax, workers’ compensation and benefits. That cost is what a hire really adds to your payroll, and it is higher than the wage.
These tools give calculations from published rules, not legal or tax advice. An exemption depends on an employee’s duties and pay as well as a job title. Each page names its sources, shows when they were checked and states what it does not cover. Everything runs in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded.