Overtime

Should You?

If you are working to trade your time and services for money, then working overtime should be you trading your time and services for more money, since you are now giving up your time to recharge, spend time with friends and family, have fun, whatever. This time is more valuable because it's what you would choose to do. Ensure you get paid accordingly.

If you can't get paid accordingly and you can say no, do so. Your time is valuable, your rest and leisure and fun is valuable, you are valuable.

Calculating Your Pay

The commonly agreed on formula for overtime is the overtime multiplier times whatever your wage is. Usually that overtime multiplier is 1.5[1] for every hour over your normal working limit (over 40 hours per week, or whatever your agreement is), with it reaching 2 with more than 8 hours overtime taken per week.

This can be hard for people where your hourly wage is not immediately apparent. Try and reduce down your big yearly wage into units you can use.

Let's start with the desired outcome, assuming we are asked to do one day of overtime and we only know our monthly wage (using $5000 for ease):

overtime multiplier * day's wage = day of overtime wages

Now we need to spell out each of these variables, reducing them until we get concrete numbers.

• overtime pay = 1.5
• day's wage = (monthly wage / average number of workdays per month)
• monthly wage = 5000
• average number of workdays per month = (365 / 12) * (5 / 7) = 21.72
• day's wage = (5000 / 21.72) = $230

Now we can fill in the gaps of our original formula:

1.5 * 230 = $345

References

1. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime

Last modified: 202401040446