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Every figure on this site comes out of one TypeScript module — the same one compiled into the Overtally app, checked against a suite of hand-computed weeks. This page is what it does, in the order it does it, and what it refuses to do for you.
Last reviewed · maintained by Ihor Bezrukavnyk · how we calculate
The calculator is not a service. There is no request behind it: the rules table and the engine ship inside the page, and the arithmetic happens on your device. Nothing you type — the rate, the hours, the state — is transmitted to us or logged anywhere.
So that a sheet survives a reload, the calculator keeps a copy in your browser’s own local storage, and the Reset button erases it. That copy never leaves your machine, which is also why the site needs no account: there is nothing on our side to attach one to. Privacy is short for the same reason.
Overtime is usually described as time and a half — 1.5× your rate for the hours past the threshold. The engine reaches the same money by a different route. Every worked minute is paid once at straight time, and each premium hour then carries a separate line for the extra half.
| line | hours | rate | amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regular — every minute worked, once | 45h | $22.00 | $990.00 |
| Weekly overtime — hours past 40, at half the regular rate | 5h | $11.00 | $55.00 |
| What the week is worth | $1,045.00 | ||
The familiar form — 40h at $22.00 plus 5h at $33.00 — reaches the same $1,045.00. The two agree whenever the rate is identical all week.
They stop agreeing the moment it is not. Overtime is owed on the regular rate: the week’s straight-time earnings divided by the hours that produced them. Work part of a week at one rate and part at another and the premium is owed on the blend, not on the rate that happened to be running when the clock crossed forty. Paying every hour once and adding the extra half separately is the form that survives that case — and it is how the federal regulations describe the calculation.
It also makes anti-pyramiding expressible. When a jurisdiction says an hour already paid a daily premium may not be counted again toward the weekly threshold, the engine simply leaves that hour out of the weekly count. It has already been paid once, in the regular line, along with everything else.
Order is not a matter of taste here. Applying the weekly rule before the daily one, or measuring a shift before the unpaid break comes out, produces a different number.
A shift becomes start-to-end minus its unpaid breaks. Paid breaks stay in the total; unpaid ones come out before anything is measured against any threshold.
Each remaining stretch is cut wherever it crosses the start of a workday or the start of a workweek. A shift from 8 PM Saturday to 4 AM Sunday is not one block of eight hours — it is two, and under most workweek anchors they belong to different weeks.
Slices carry the workday they landed in, and slices sharing a workday accumulate against the same daily threshold. A five-hour morning and a five-hour evening in California is a ten-hour workday with two hours of daily overtime, not two short shifts with none.
Total straight-time earnings for the week divided by the hours that produced them. With one rate all week that is simply your rate; with two it is the blend, and every premium below is priced off it — not off whichever rate happened to apply during the overtime hour.
Where the jurisdiction sets one, minutes elapsed inside the workday cross into the premium tier — after eight hours in California, ten in Oregon, twelve in Colorado — and into a second tier where one exists, double time after twelve in California and British Columbia.
Where the rule exists, and only when all seven workdays of that one workweek carry hours, the seventh day is priced at the premium the jurisdiction sets: in California, time and a half for the first eight hours and double time beyond. The count resets at the workweek boundary rather than rolling, so seven days that straddle two weeks can owe nothing.
Only then is the week measured against 40, 44 or 48 hours — and how the daily and weekly rules meet is itself a rule, which is where hand calculations most often go wrong.
Each line is rounded to the nearest cent, half up, and the total is the sum of the rounded lines, so the total always agrees with the lines printed above it. Weeks are then dropped into the pay period that contains them: a biweekly stub is two workweeks priced separately and added, never eighty hours averaged.
Three patterns cover all 64 jurisdictions in the dataset. Every rule page states which one it follows.
| interaction | what the engine does | where |
|---|---|---|
| Anti-pyramiding | Hours already paid a daily or seventh-day premium are taken out of the count toward the weekly threshold. No hour is ever paid a premium twice. | 9 of 64California, Alaska, British Columbia, Saskatchewan |
| Greater of | The week is priced twice — once on the daily rules alone, once on the weekly rule alone — and the larger of the two premiums is the one owed. Adding them together overstates the week. | 3 of 64Colorado, Oregon, Alberta |
| Weekly only | There is no daily threshold at all, so every straight-time hour counts toward the weekly one. A fourteen-hour day here owes nothing on its own. | 52 of 64Texas, Ontario, Quebec |
A wrong assumption is worse than a question, because it produces a confident number nobody can check. These are the five the engine asks about instead.
A workweek is a fixed, recurring period of 168 hours that your employer designates. It can begin on any day at any hour, it is usually printed on your stub, and it decides which hours land past the threshold. The calculator on this site assumes Sunday at midnight because a public page has to assume something; the app asks you once and prints the answer back on every result.
Overtally prices hours as though the overtime rules apply to them. It does not decide whether they do. Exempt status turns on duties and salary tests, and no form can settle it — the same is true of the industry limits inside the dataset, like Oregon’s daily rule reaching manufacturing and cannery work only.
Ontario allows hours to be averaged over up to four weeks, but only under a written agreement approved under s. 22(2); Alberta banks overtime at an hour per overtime hour for time earned since 1 September 2019; Nunavut requires a permit from its Labour Standards Board. Each changes the arithmetic, and none of them can be inferred from your hours.
A night, weekend or holiday differential is defined by the hours your employer set, not by a calendar convention. The engine takes the window as an input — including whether that premium belongs in the regular rate, which moves every overtime line beneath it — and will not invent one.
New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador set overtime as a multiple of the provincial minimum wage rather than of your own rate, and Nova Scotia does the same for listed occupation classes. Those pages say so plainly; the calculator prices the week from the rate you typed.
One rule, no exceptions: every threshold, multiplier and effective date traces to a statute, a regulation or a government agency page. Not a payroll blog, not an HR newsletter, not a comparison table that copied another comparison table.
The reason is concrete. Prince Edward Island’s overtime threshold fell from 48 hours to 44 on 30 June 2026 under a new Employment Standards Act. Most secondary tables still print 48. A site assembled from secondary tables would print 48 as well, and it would look exactly as authoritative while doing it.
So each rule page carries its own citation and the date the page was last read against it. That date moves when someone re-reads the source — not when the site is redeployed.
Minimum wages and overtime thresholds move, and most of the movement clusters on 1 January. Every rule page is re-opened against its source in that window, whether or not anything is expected to have changed, and the reviewed dates are refreshed together.
Some changes do not wait for January. Newfoundland and Labrador’s overtime wage is set by regulation and moves with the minimum wage each 1 April. Prince Edward Island’s new threshold arrived at the end of June. Those get checked on their own dates, and any page whose figure is pegged to a minimum wage is flagged in the dataset so it can be found without reading all 64 of them.
If a figure here is wrong, the useful thing is to say which one and point at the source. Send the jurisdiction, the figure you believe is wrong, the figure you believe is right and a link to the statute or agency page that says so — support@overtally.com.
Confirmed corrections ship the same week, and the page’s reviewed date moves with them. If the page turns out to be right, the reply carries the source it was built from. The full list of what to include is on the contact page.
Every figure is what the hours are worth under the rules. Deductions of any kind are outside what this site models, and there is no plan to add them.
The pages explain a rule, compute what it produces and cite the section it came from. What to do about a gap is a question for your state labour agency, your provincial employment standards office or a lawyer.
The engine knows the hours you entered and the statutory floor. It does not know your collective agreement, your employer’s own policy, or an exemption that removes a rule for your job — Alaska’s daily rule, for instance, does not reach employers with fewer than four employees, and Nevada’s applies only below a wage threshold. Where a contract pays better than the statute, the contract governs and this figure is the floor.
Nothing here reads your stub. The comparison — what the rules produce against what landed in your account — is the one step that stays yours.
No. The rules table and the pay engine are part of the page your browser already downloaded, so the arithmetic runs on your own device, and nothing you enter is transmitted to us or logged. The one copy that exists is the one the calculator keeps in your own browser so a filled-in sheet survives a reload — the Reset button erases it.
Because the engine pays each minute once at straight time and adds the premium as its own line. 45 hours at $22.00 is $990.00 of regular pay plus $55.00 of weekly overtime premium — the same $1,045.00 as 40 hours at $22.00 plus 5 at $33.00, and still correct in the cases where the shorter form breaks, such as a rate that changed mid-week.
Not anywhere. California-style jurisdictions take the daily premium and then exclude those hours from the weekly count; Colorado, Oregon and Alberta price the week both ways and pay the greater of the two. Adding both overstates what is owed, and it is the most common error in a hand calculation.
A workweek is a fixed, recurring 168-hour period designated by your employer. It can start on any day at any hour. The same seven shifts split across two different anchors produce different overtime, which is why the site states the anchor it assumed and the app asks you for the real one.
Each rule page shows the date it was last read against its own source. Most changes cluster on 1 January and every page is re-verified then, but some do not wait: Newfoundland and Labrador’s overtime wage moves with the minimum wage each 1 April, and Prince Edward Island’s threshold dropped from 48 hours to 44 on 30 June 2026.
That is what it is for. Enter the week as you worked it, compare the total to the stub, and read the cited section if the two disagree. It is your own record and your own estimate — not a payroll statement, and not a substitute for one.
Every figure on this page traces to the statute or agency page above. If one is out of date, tell us — corrections ship the same week.
Overtally computes what you should be paid before taxes. It does not calculate take-home pay, withholding or deductions, and it is not legal advice — it is your own record and your own estimate.