How Much Is Overtime Pay? Rates at $15 to $25 an Hour

How much is overtime pay? Under federal law it's 1.5 times your regular rate for every hour past 40 in a workweek, so a $20-per-hour employee earns $30 for each overtime hour. The rate is simple. What a full week pays, when double time applies, how bonuses change the rate, and what taxes take back is where this article goes.

The 1.5x requirement comes from 29 U.S.C. 207, the overtime section of the Fair Labor Standards Act. That single overtime rule sets the floor for FLSA overtime pay nationwide. It applies to non-exempt employees, which covers most hourly workers in the US and plenty of salaried ones too. Everything below assumes non-exempt status; if you're not sure which side of that line you're on, that's the first thing to check, because exempt employees have no legal overtime rate at all.

How much is overtime pay per hour at common wages?

What is the overtime pay rate? Multiply your regular rate by 1.5. That's the whole formula for the hourly figure:

• $15 an hour becomes $22.50 in overtime
• $18 an hour becomes $27
• $20 an hour becomes $30
• $22 an hour becomes $33
• $25 an hour becomes $37.50
• $30 an hour becomes $45

Notice the gap between your regular rate and your overtime rate equals half your wage. So what is overtime pay, structurally? A straight-time hour plus a premium half. That half is called the overtime premium, and it matters later in this article for two reasons: bonuses change it, and the federal tax code now treats it differently from the rest of your paycheck.

How much do you make on overtime? Weekly totals by wage

Hourly rates are abstract. Weekly checks are what people plan around. How is overtime calculated across a whole week? The same multiplier, applied only to the hours past 40, so here are the real totals for the three most common overtime weeks:

The leverage is worth noticing. Going from 40 to 60 hours raises your hours by 50% but your gross pay by 75%, because every added hour lands at the premium rate. That's exactly why the FLSA was written this way: Congress wanted long hours to be expensive enough that employers would hire another person instead. Sometimes they do. Often they pay the premium anyway, which is why overtime math is worth knowing cold on both sides of the paycheck. To run your own numbers at any wage and hour count, use the free overtime calculator.

Annualize those weeks and the stakes get clearer. A steady 50-hour week at $20 an hour grosses $57,200 a year against $41,600 for straight 40s, a $15,600 difference produced entirely by 10 weekly overtime hours. That's also the number an employer should stare at, because $15,600 in annual premium pay for one person is most of the way to a part-time hire who would work those same 10 hours at straight time. Overtime as an occasional surge tool is cheap. Overtime as a permanent staffing plan usually isn't, and the weekly totals table is how you check which one you're running.

What is time and a half, and when does it start?

Time and a half is the everyday name for the 1.5x overtime rate. Federally, it starts after 40 hours of work in a workweek, a fixed and recurring 7-day cycle your employer defines. Not after 8 hours in a day. Not on weekends or holidays as such. A 12-hour Saturday in a 38-hour week pays straight time under federal law, which surprises a lot of people. Our time and a half guide covers the edge cases, including holiday pay myths.

Two more federal details worth having straight. First, the workweek can't be averaged: 50 hours one week and 30 the next means 10 overtime hours are owed, even on a biweekly paycheck. Second, unauthorized overtime still pays. If the employer knew or should have known you were working, the hours count, and the fix for a policy violation is discipline, not an edited timesheet.

Double time: when overtime pays 2x

Federal law never requires double time. State law sometimes does, and CA overtime rules are the big exception. Under Labor Code section 510, overtime pay in California runs 1.5x after 8 hours in a workday, double time after 12 hours in a day, and on the seventh consecutive workday of a workweek, 1.5x for the first 8 hours and double time after that. Alaska and Nevada have daily 1.5x rules of their own, and Colorado's daily overtime starts after 12 hours, but none of them require double time the way California does.

Example: a $20-per-hour employee in California works a 14-hour day. The first 8 hours pay $160, hours 9 through 12 pay $120 at $30, and hours 13 and 14 pay $80 at $40. That single day grosses $360, against $280 if only federal rules applied and the week stayed under 40 hours. State rules change the answer to "how much for overtime pay" by a lot, so check the overtime pay laws by state in our state-by-state overtime guides, and the California guide specifically if you live or hire there. CA overtime law is worth reading twice. California laws on overtime pay reach hours that federal rules ignore entirely, and the daily overtime California requires can land in a week that never touches 40 hours.

Bonuses raise your overtime rate, and most people miss it

What constitutes overtime pay isn't the wage printed on your offer letter. Your regular rate is not just your hourly wage. Under section 207(e), it includes all remuneration for the week with a short list of exclusions, which means nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, and most commissions flow in before the 1.5x multiplier is applied. Anything promised in advance, like a production bonus or attendance bonus, is nondiscretionary. Gifts and truly discretionary bonuses stay out.

Example: you earn $15 an hour, work 50 hours, and earn a $100 production bonus. Straight-time pay is 50 times $15 plus $100, which is $850, so the regular rate is $17. You're owed a premium of half that rate for each of the 10 overtime hours: 10 times $8.50, or $85. Weekly total: $935. An employer who pays $825 in wages plus the $100 bonus has paid $925 and shorted you $10. Small per week, real across a year and a crew, and it's one of the most common wage claims there is. Shift differentials work the same way: a $1 evening differential on overtime hours raises the rate the premium is computed on, not just the base pay.

Is overtime pay taxable, and how much is overtime pay taxed?

Yes, it's taxable, and it's taxed like ordinary wages with one temporary and widely misunderstood exception. The rules on taxing overtime pay changed for tax years 2025 through 2028, when 26 U.S.C. 225 began letting workers deduct the premium portion of FLSA overtime, the extra half of time and a half, from federal taxable income. Per the IRS's summary of the provision, the deduction is capped at $12,500 per year for single filers and $25,000 for joint filers, phases out above $150,000 of modified adjusted gross income ($300,000 joint), and is available whether or not you itemize.

What that means at $20 an hour: your $30 overtime hour is still fully subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes, and $20 of it is still subject to federal income tax. Only the $10 premium is deductible, and only when you file; paycheck withholding doesn't change much. Someone working 500 overtime hours a year deducts $5,000, worth roughly $600 in the 12% bracket. Real money, not tax-free overtime. State income tax generally still applies to the whole check. The full breakdown, including a paycheck walkthrough, is in our is overtime taxed guide.

Two things people get wrong about overtime pay and taxes. First, withholding tables can make a fat check look like it was punished, which is why "is overtime taxable at a higher rate" is such a persistent question. It isn't. A bigger check for one period lands in a higher withholding bracket for that period, and filing settles the difference. Second, no overtime pay tax calculator can tell you what the overtime deduction is worth without your full return, because the answer depends on your bracket, your modified AGI against the phase-out, and how many of your premium hours were required by federal law rather than by your state. Headlines promising no taxes on overtime are describing a deduction on one slice of one tax.

Special cases: tipped workers, two jobs, and piece rates

Tipped employees get overtime on the full minimum wage, not the reduced cash wage. An employer taking a tip credit can't compute time and a half off the $2.13 federal cash wage; the overtime rate builds from the full applicable minimum wage first, with the tip credit subtracted after. Getting this backwards is one of the most common violations in restaurants, and it shortchanges servers on every overtime hour. Current state minimums are in our minimum wage guide.

Two pay rates at one employer, say $18 on the counter and $22 on deliveries, get blended. The default is a weighted average: total straight-time earnings divided by total hours sets the regular rate for that week's premium. That blended figure, not either posted rate, is the one the overtime calculation has to run on. Working two different jobs for two unrelated employers is separate; those hours don't combine, and neither employer owes overtime until its own 40-hour line is crossed.

How is overtime pay calculated when there's no hourly wage at all? Piece-rate and flat-rate workers earn overtime too. Divide the week's piece earnings by hours worked to get the regular rate, then add half that rate for each overtime hour. No pay structure escapes the premium; it just changes how the regular rate is computed.

Do salaried employees get overtime pay?

Many do. A salary is a pay method, not an exemption. Unless the role passes both the federal salary test, currently $684 per week under 29 CFR 541.600, and a duties test for an exemption category, a salaried employee is non-exempt and earns overtime like anyone else. How to figure out overtime pay for a salaried non-exempt employee: convert the salary to an hourly regular rate first. A $45,760 salary over 2,080 hours is $22 an hour, so overtime pays $33.

The classic miss is the retail or restaurant assistant manager on a modest salary who works 55-hour weeks and gets no overtime because "managers don't get overtime." If most of the shift is spent on the same work as the crew, the exemption likely fails and 15 hours a week of time and a half is accruing unpaid. Employers should audit those roles yearly. Employees in them should keep their own hour records.

How do you calculate overtime pay? A five-minute check

Whether you're the worker or the one running payroll, the same audit works. Here's how to calculate overtime pay from scratch, then compare the result against the stub. Pull one week's punch times and walk through it:

1. Confirm the workweek boundaries. Overtime is computed inside a fixed 7-day cycle, and a Wednesday-to-Tuesday workweek changes which hours count as overtime compared with a Sunday start.
2. Total the hours actually worked, including any before-shift prep or after-close cleanup that happened on the clock or off it.
3. Compute the regular rate: all straight-time earnings for the week, including nondiscretionary bonuses and differentials, divided by total hours.
4. Multiply hours over 40 by 1.5 times that rate. In a daily-overtime state, apply the daily triggers first, then the weekly one to the remaining hours.
5. Compare against the stub. The overtime line should show both the hours and the rate, and the rate should be at least 1.5 times the regular rate, not 1.5 times the base wage in a bonus week.

Discrepancies are usually one of three things: hours missing from the count, a bonus left out of the regular rate, or state daily rules ignored. All three repeat weekly until someone catches them, which is the argument for checking one normal week rather than waiting for a blowup. Five minutes with a calculator settles most overtime arguments before they start. A calculator for overtime pay will do the arithmetic faster, but calculating overtime by hand once is what teaches you which inputs actually move the number.

The hours decide the paycheck, so track them

Overtime disputes are rarely about the multiplication. They're about the hours: off-the-clock prep, rounded-down punches, missed split shifts, the workweek boundary landing mid-shift. If you're an employee, keep your own log of start and stop times; in a records dispute, a contemporaneous personal log carries real weight. If you're an employer, run a time clock that timestamps every punch and totals hours against the fixed workweek automatically, because those records are your defense and your early-warning system at the same time.

Kloqk's free time clock does exactly that, flagging overtime as it accrues rather than after payroll closes, and it costs nothing at any headcount. Pair it with the overtime calculator and both sides of the paycheck can agree on the number before payday instead of arguing about it after.

Two settings decide whether any of this lands correctly. Your payroll overtime configuration and your time clock have to agree on where the workweek starts, or the two systems will disagree about which hours are premium hours and payroll will win by default. And if you're an employee working out how to find overtime that never showed up on a stub, total your own punch times one week at a time rather than by pay period. Averaging across two weeks is the single most common reason an overtime payment goes missing.

One habit ties all of this together: check the math on one ordinary week now, while nothing is in dispute. A ten-minute audit of a boring pay stub costs nothing. The same audit performed two years later by a plaintiff's attorney, multiplied across every week and every employee, is how small payroll shortcuts turn into settlements. Whichever side of the paycheck you're on, be the one who ran the numbers first.