Everything You Need to Know About State Laws and Overtime

Being in the business of time tracking, we know how important it is to abide by labor laws. That’s why we make it easy for you to customize your policies with rules that correspond to your circumstances. Whether it be creating policies that work with new sick leave laws or setting up typical policies like a vacation, when it comes to time off, we have you covered.

However, what about overtime? While federal law calculates overtime on a weekly basis, some states calculate overtime on a daily basis. To give a brief overview, according to the federal overtime provisions contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act, overtime is owed when an employee exceeds working 40 hours in a work week. Many employers include other types of hours in their 40-hour calculations, such as holiday, vacation time, and sick day pay. However, this is strictly up to CBA, union agreement, or company policy.

Not all employees are entitled to overtime, but most are. However, many states have their own laws on what constitutes overtime, and not all states operate on a weekly schedule. When this is the case, employees are covered by whichever law is more protective of their rights.

As a helpful resource, we are sharing the following table provided by Employment Law Firms that describes the overtime laws of each state and the covered employers. (For more detail, we’ve hyperlinked each state to its official labor laws page so you can always have the most current information available.) While you probably already know your local rules, you might just learn something new:

Now that you know your state’s overtime laws, you can easily build an overtime policy according to those rules using FingerCheck. Not only can you set certain conditions for when overtime should calculate, but you can also build as many rules as necessary to abide by your state’s overtime laws. For instance, California employers would need to create a daily overtime rule and a weekly overtime rule that would work together to fully cover their employees. As you can see in the rule box below, every overtime type that exists is listed, and once you finish building a rule you can build a new one.

The rule box also lets you input conditions around which your overtime policy should operate. For instance, you can enter the hours above which overtime should begin to take effect (for instance, for a weekly overtime rule you would write 40) and even set the hours maximum at which overtime should stop accruing. For full details, see our help desk article on how to set up overtime policies.

As you can see, setting up versatile overtime policies that comply with state and federal laws is easy with FingerCheck. Clients can call tech support or use our Help Desk to set up their policies, and businesses new to FingerCheck can sign up for a 30-day free trial.

Table Credit: Employment Law Firms