What is considered overtime hours?
Is it anything over 40 hours A WEEK, or by PAY PERIOD? Do all jobs have to pay overtime or is it by company?
Im in New York City.
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
32 Answers
If you are an hourly employee you must be paid overtime. If you are a salaried employee you can be offered compensatory time, but good luck getting it.
It can depend on business to business but in general it’s anything over 40hrs per week.
@JesusWasAJewbot Some labor laws for hourly employees say anything after 8 hours per day, but must be full time employee ( 40 hours per week ). Does not cover casual employees a class of part time employees. But can be different for different states.
@JesusWasAJewbot in NY, it’s over 40 hours per week. It doesn’t matter how many you work on a given day. If the total per work week is over 40, then the excess is overtime. And hours paid but not worked don’t count.
For example, in two weeks, many of us will get 8 hours of holiday pay for Presidents Day, on Monday 2/15. Now, if on Tuesday 2/16, you work 10 hours, and the rest of the week you work only your normal 8 hours, you’ll be paid for a total of 42 hours that week. But those 2 extra hours aren’t overtime, because you didn’t work more than 40 hours that week.
Similarly, if on a normal work week you work 10 hours one day, 6 the next, and 8 the rest, that’s still only 40 hours. No overtime. The fact that you worked more than 8 one day doesn’t matter.
Also, just because you worked overtime doesn’t mean you get overtime (1.5x) pay. That depends on your job category. If your job is classified as “exempt”, you don’t get any overtime pay. If it isn’t, you do. Again, that’s your job category, not your company. The categories of jobs are determined by state laws and regulations. A company cannot decide on its own whether or not to pay you overtime.
Like the other answers, it depends on the business. I have seen the following business handle overtime.
– Anything over 40 hours in a work week
– Anything over 8 hours worked in a work day
– Company approved holidays regardless of hours
But again, depends on the company.
With our company it is any time worked above 40 hours.
And usually companies must specifically approve your overtime. Which is to say, if you are working full time somewhere and you switch shifts with someone from, say, your Monday to Sunday, thus working an extra shift that week and going over 40 hours, without specifically getting permission to do so, the company may not pay overtime.
Usually overtime policies are spelled out fairly clearly in the company handbook.
Overtime, generally does not apply to salaried employees, only by the hour employees qualify for overtime. overtime is based on the following: a seven day workweek, eight hours a day and 40 hours worked within the seven days. anything over 40 hours is at time and a half.
In our police department, many years ago, our government did not want to pay police officers overtime, based on the method above. the officers union sued in Federal Court and won. had each officer been paid a salary, then overtime would not have been an issue. overtime pay is now in our police budget. the key is 40 hours worked in a seven day work period at 8 hours a day.
@MrItty has the right answer. It doesn’t matter what company, industry, state, or city you are in, if you are in the United States overtime pay applies to anything worked over 40 hours in a work week. Individual states, industries, cities, or companies may have more generous means of distributing overtime pay, but you still get overtime for anything over 40 hours in a work week. Salary and hourly pay are not the determinants of whether you are required to be paid overtime. Salaried employees should also receive overtime pay or compensatory time if they work over 40 hours in a week, if they are not in an overtime exempt job category. Used to be that a lot of companies just put people on salary, pretended that made them an overtime exempt job category, and proceeded to work them to death. Then the labor laws changed during the Bush administration, making it much easier to say someone is in an exempt job category, so most companies that were breaking the law no longer are.
An example of how your job can be more generous than the 40 hour federal standard, but never less: in the business of producing live entertainment, stagehands have to be hired in each locality that a show stops in to put up and tear down the show. So for a touring theater show or a rock concert, a bunch of people are hired to put in the show in the morning, run the show, and tear it down at night. It makes for very long hours, but often few days of work in a given week. So where there are strong unions they have negotiated a system in which time and a half is paid starting at the eight hour mark or sometimes after a certain time at night. Usually that is converted to double time if there is not a one hour meal break after 5 hours. But if you have a lot of shows in one week and you go over forty hours, you will likely have been paid time and a half for more hours than the number of hours over forty you worked. In the case that you actually only work eight hours a day but work a seven day week (very rare in this business) you would then half to get time and a half for the hours over forty in the week.
Usually it’s over 40 in a week and over 8 in a day. In California you get overtime if you go (I think) over 5 hours without a lunch and a 10 minuet break in every 4 hours is mandatory or overtime applies. Over 12 hours in a day and double time applies. But California has a lot of strange laws.
Of course this is for hourly employees.
Exempt (or salaried) employees must make at least double the minimum wage.
@Judi indeed it does. It’s funny – every time the HR department sends a mass email to the company, it always has to include a special section for associates in California, because the rules that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to them.
Overtime is only paid when an hourly employee was authorized to work beyond their scheduled 40 hours in a week. As an HR practitioner, all claimed OT hours must be authorized by a manager or supervisor. I have encountered employees clocking in 15 minutes earlier than their report time and clocking out 15 minutes beyond their schedule and thought that they have rightfully earned an extra half hour per day, which would then in tunr entitle them to a 2.5 hours of OT per week. But, we didn’t have to pay the OT because he was not supposed to clock in early and leave late during those times.
Read your employee handbook and if something is fuzzy, you should have your HR dept. explain the policies to your satisfaction.
@MrItty you’re correct whenyou say “for all time worked” however, merely clocking-in early and working are 2 different things.
@njnyjobs well now that’s something different entirely. An employee who falsifies records like time sheets is subject to all sorts of other penalties.
Regardless of that fraud, your statement ”Overtime is only paid when an hourly employee was authorized to work beyond their scheduled 40 hours in a week” is simply wrong. Overtime is paid when an employee works over 40 hours in a week, regardless of authorization.
@MrItty… at my jobsite, all hourly employees are at the direction of a supervisor or manager. Without any guidance or direction to perform work well beyond their schedule, employees are expected to clock-out. Like I said, a thorough understanding of the employee handbook is a must for any newbie.
@njnyjobs “expected” and “actual” are not the same thing. It doesn’t matter if John Smith is “expected” to clock out at 4pm or not. If he’s scheduled to clock out at 4pm, the boss expects him to clock out at 4pm, but he in fact works an extra hour and doesn’t leave until 5pm, he is owed 1 hour of over time pay.
The company is free to discipline him all they want. Remove his priviledges, give him a low peformance rating, even terminate his employment. But they’re not allowed to refrain from paying him that extra hour. The company’s “expectations” are irrelevant.
@MrItty . . .then I stand corrected on the generalization of my prior statement. At any rate, OT pay is frowned upon at our workplace and is constantly monitored. With ID scanners and computerized time-keeping, we have reduced OT abuse among hourly wage earners and hold managers and supervisors accountable of their budgets.
As it relates to OP, a clear understanding of the company’s HR policies may be the thin line between a steady job and unemployment.
Some companies try to get around the overtime law by making the employee clock out one day, and clock back in the next day, a few minutes later, to avoid the 8 hour rule.
I have also heard of the same thing regarding the work week. I’m not sure how that works, but it is probably fraud.
Just to add one thing: under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the employer has the right to define the start and end of the base period used to calculate forty hours.
The week could begin at midnight Saturday, noon Sunday or 6:00 am Friday, so long as the base period is forty hours. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BEGIN ON MONDAY MORNING.
My son works for a large national retailer where the week begins at midnight on Friday night. That is how their work weeks are calculated.
SRM
The biggest thing you have to watch for as an employer is to ensure that your employees’ job descriptions are up-to-date and that each position is classified correctly under the FLSA.
In particular, the classification of supervisory personnel and lower-management personnel like the “assistant manager” or manager “trainee” are often misclassified as “exempt” when they are, in fact, non-exempt positions.
As an employee, you should also be certain that your position is defined correctly. If you are entitled to O/T you should be paid O/T.
The criteria used to classify employees as exempt or non-exempt are confusing and contradictory and frequently applied incorrectly.
Try reading the regulations and figuring out what is right and what is wrong. Like most legislative language it is deliberately vague and confusing to read.
Yup i talked to my boss and i dont get overtime at all. Nothing over 40 hours gets me overtime pay.
He didnt say why but i think its because im a “contracted” employee and not a direct employee?
@JesusWasAJewbot
What exactly are you doing for a living at the present time? What kind of business or industry are you in?
When he says you are a contracted employee, what does that mean? Are you being paid on regular payroll with deductions for FICA and Medicare and withholding taxes or are you being paid your gross wages with no deductions? (This might not be legal but let’s get at the reality of the situation).
Now in the real world, you are not going to be getting overtime from this guy. He is not going to pay it to you and there is not much you can do about it at the moment. In this economy, with the scarcity of jobs and the difficulty in finding a new one, I would not rock the boat too much.
But what is critical and what you ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY must do is keep a written record of your work hours: the time you arrived, the time you left for a meal break, the time you returned after your lunch break and the time you left work. If you are being given work to do at home after hours, keep a record of what was given to you and how much time you spent on it. Keep a WRITTEN record, not on a spreadsheet and update it every day. If you need to produce this for some reason (see below) then you don’t want to have to reconstruct it. If you can show that you recorded this information daily or at least weekly, you will have more credibility.
No one stays at a job for life. When you leave, if you truly were non-exempt under the FLSA, you have a cause of action against this employer. You should go to the NYS Department of Labor, or the US Department of Labor (from my experience the State guys are a lot nastier about this) and file a complaint that you were not paid overtime as the law provides and let it proceed from there.
But do not do this while you are still employed here. That would be like putting a gun in your mouth and you don’t want to do anything that might impair your continued employment. Keeping your job is paramount.
You might get advice that you should immediately file a complaint but I would not do that. An investigation might take a long time to be started, if it even was started at all.
In the meantime if you want to post your a brief description of what you do, we could have a look at seeing if you are exempt or non-exempt or you could send me a private comment or you can look on the Federal Department of Labor website http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/screen75.asp
Good luck
SRM
I am an IT Assistant (signed a contract as a contract employee) not a direct employee of 7 City Learning, its an international compamy based in US – London – Singapore.
Are you an employee of someone? If you are an independent contractor yourself then you’ve got a bad deal and may be in for a serious headache when it comes to taxes. If you are an employee of someone then you are owed overtime. There was some expansion of the exempt classifications into certain computer technology jobs, but the “Assistant” part of your title suggests that you should not be an overtime exempt employee.
Also, in addition to being a raw deal for certain kinds of jobs, there are legal limits on what kind of worker can be an independent contractor. Anybody with “assistant” in their title doesn’t likely qualify as an independent contractor either. Independent contractors generally set their own hours, supply their own tools and equipment, and work for a contracted payment, not on an hourly rate. If you are paid hourly and are being treated as an independent contractor, that is probably illegal too.
There is no such thing as a contracted employee. An employee may have an employment contract that governs certain terms and conditions of his or her employment such as notice of termination, severance pay, clause not to compete, duration of employment but under the FLSA you are either an employee or an independent contractor. If you are an employee you are entitle to overtime if you work more than 40 hours in a week.
Snarp is correct, certain IT jobs were exempted when the FLSA regulations were changed a few years ago. If you are earning more than $100,000 you may be exempt no matter what your job title is. <I don’t recall exactly how this works> If you are earning less than $23,200 you get overtime no matter what you do.
IT titles can be deceiving, but based on the criteria that @Snarp gave you, you can figure out if you are an employee or a contractor.
If you are being treated as a contractor and the employer filed a 1099 for you for 2009 or is not taking payroll tax deductions he is treating you as an independent contractor.
You are going to be liable for self-employment tax of 15% and you have to file quarterly withholding and pay the withholding under IRS regulations.
What does your paycheck say?
But tread lightly, don’t go into your boss with guns blazing. Are you the only employee? How are other co-workers being treated?
SRM
Response moderated (Spam)
Response moderated (Spam)
Answer this question 
This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.
Composing members:
0
