Overtime Laws by State: Daily, Weekly and 7th-Day Rules

The federal floor: over 40 hours in a fixed workweek

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime for covered, non-exempt employees for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, at not less than 1.5 times the regular rate.

Three details decide most real cases:

• The workweek is fixed. It is a regularly recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive 24-hour periods. It can start on any day and at any hour, but once set it stays put.
• Each workweek stands alone. Hours are never averaged across two weeks, whatever the pay period. A 30-hour week followed by a 50-hour week has 10 overtime hours.
• There is no federal daily overtime. The federal regulation says the law does not generally require overtime for hours over eight in a day, or for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays or regular days of rest.

The “regular rate” is not always your base rate. Bonuses you were promised, shift differentials and a second job rate all go into it. The regular rate guide explains how. This guide uses a single hourly rate so the hours stay in focus.

State law can only add to this floor. When a state rule and the federal rule both apply, the worker gets the result that pays more.

How the 51 jurisdictions line up

The site’s state dataset holds one row for each state and DC, each checked against official sources on October 22, 2026. Grouped by the headline rule for adult, non-exempt, private-sector employees, they fall into seven groups.

Two of the “no state law” rows, Georgia and Mississippi, are marked partly confirmed in the data. Every source found agrees with the federal-only reading, but no state statute text or agency sentence saying so could be read.

A “same as the FLSA” state is not identical in every way. Its law may cover workers the FLSA leaves out, list different exemptions, or compute the regular rate differently. Massachusetts, for example, leaves sales commissions out of its state regular rate. The arithmetic for an ordinary hourly week is the same, though: over 40 hours, time and a half.

The five states with daily overtime

Daily overtime counts the hours in each workday, not only the week. Each of the five has its own threshold and its own conditions.

• Alaska: over 8 hours in a day or 40 in a week, at 1.5×. It applies only when the employer has 4 or more employees in the regular course of business. A voluntary flexible work hour plan, approved by the state labor department or part of a collective bargaining agreement, moves the daily line to 10 hours.
• California: over 8 hours in a day at 1.5×, over 12 hours in a day at 2×, plus over 40 in a week at 1.5×. An alternative workweek schedule adopted by secret-ballot election can allow up to 10-hour days without daily overtime.
• Colorado: over 12 hours in a day at 1.5×, plus over 40 in a week. Colorado also counts any 12 consecutive hours, even across two workdays, and pays whichever of the three counts gives more.
• Nevada: over 8 hours in a workday at 1.5×, with three conditions. The hourly rate must be under $18.00 (1.5 times the state minimum wage), the worker must not be on a mutually agreed schedule of four 10-hour days, and the employer must have $250,000 or more in yearly gross sales. Weekly overtime over 40 applies whatever the rate.
• Oregon: over 10 hours in a day at 1.5×, but only in mills, factories, manufacturing establishments, canneries, driers, packing plants and seafood processors. Sawmills, planing mills, shingle mills and logging camps are not included. Most other Oregon workers have weekly overtime only.

If a condition is not met, that state’s daily rule simply drops out, and the weekly rule still applies. The daily overtime guide compares the five states on the same long-shift week.

Seventh-day overtime: California and Kentucky

Two states pay a premium for the seventh day worked in a row inside one workweek.

• California: on the seventh consecutive day of work in a workweek, the first 8 hours are paid at 1.5× and every hour after 8 at 2×.
• Kentucky: an employer who permits an employee to work all seven days of a workweek pays time and a half for the seventh day. The statute does not apply when the employee is not permitted to work more than 40 hours that week. The site reads that as a week of more than 40 hours worked, which matches the U.S. Department of Labor’s summary.

Connecticut has a narrower rule. Its restaurant and hotel restaurant wage order pays the seventh consecutive day at 1.5 times the minimum rate, not the regular rate. The table lists it, but the calculator does not apply it.

The seventh-day guide works through weeks where the rule changes the pay and weeks where it does not.

Weekly lines above 40, and state laws that step aside

Kansas sets its weekly line at 46 hours and Minnesota at 48. Neither lowers anyone’s overtime. Both laws reach only employers or employees the FLSA does not cover. Kansas law excludes employers subject to the FLSA, and Minnesota’s poster says federally covered employers and employees get overtime after 40.

Several 40-hour states also write their overtime law so it applies mainly where the FLSA does not. The data notes this for Indiana, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Hawaii’s law excludes FLSA-covered employment except where the FLSA’s maximum workweek would be higher. West Virginia excludes employers when 80% of their employees are subject to a federal overtime law. For most workers in these states, the federal 40-hour rule is the one that applies.

Rules the table shows but calculators don’t compute

Some state rules depend on industry, schedule elections or facts a time card cannot show. The table lists them for each state, and the calculator notes them rather than guessing. From the data:

• Rhode Island: most covered employers pay at least 1.5 times the normal rate for work on Sundays and listed holidays, with a long list of excluded businesses.
• Colorado: overtime after any 12 consecutive hours across two workdays.
• Nevada: the workday is 24 hours from the time work begins, so a shift that starts less than 24 hours after the last one began can add daily overtime.
• Alaska and California: the 10-hour flexible plan and the alternative workweek schedule.
• Oregon: agricultural overtime after 48 hours a week in 2025 and 2026, and after 40 from January 1, 2027.
• Hospital 8-and-80 options: Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Vermont let hospitals and some care employers use a 14-day period, with overtime after 8 hours a day or 80 hours in the period, by agreement or election.
• Higher lines for narrow groups: New York residential employees (44 hours), North Dakota taxicab drivers (50), Missouri seasonal amusement businesses (52), Hawaii seasonal agricultural processing (48 for up to 20 workweeks), and Montana students at seasonal amusement or recreation areas who get board or lodging (48).
• Florida and Wyoming: Florida’s manual-labor statute mentions “extra pay” after 10 hours without setting a rate. Wyoming’s daily rule covers public works projects only.

None of these replaces the federal floor. Where the FLSA covers the job, over 40 hours in the workweek is still time and a half.

How the rules combine: no pyramiding, greater of state and federal

Two principles keep the arithmetic honest. No pyramiding means an hour already paid as daily overtime is not counted again toward the weekly 40. California’s wage order says this in its text. Greater of means the state result and the federal result are both computed, and the worker gets whichever pays more. For Alaska, the no-double-count wording was not found in the pages read, so the site applies the general practice and says so on the state’s row.

Here is the procedure the site’s calculator follows for one workweek:

1. Add each day in minutes. Subtract unpaid meal breaks and record the day’s worked time in h:mm.
2. Apply the state’s daily tiers. For each day, minutes over the daily line go to 1.5× (and, in California, minutes over 12 hours go to 2×). Skip this step where the state has no daily rule or its conditions are not met.
3. Apply the seventh-day rule if all seven days of the workweek have work and the state has one (California, or Kentucky when the week is over 40 hours).
4. Count weekly overtime on what is left. Add only the straight-time minutes, in workweek order. Once they pass 40 hours (46 in Kansas, 48 in Minnesota), the rest is overtime at 1.5×.
5. Compute the federal result separately. Every minute over 40 in the workweek at 1.5×, no daily rule.
6. Keep whichever result pays more. If the two pay the same, the calculator shows the state split.
7. Convert to decimal once, at the end. Totals are added in minutes, then converted to hours rounded to two places.

Worked example: one week, federal rule and California

The inputs below are the site’s standard example week, entered on a time card at $24.50 an hour. The workweek starts Sunday, and Sunday is a day off.

Under the federal rule, the first 40:00 is straight time. Monday through Thursday add up to 36:31 (36.52 hours). Friday crosses the line: 3:29 straight and 4:28 overtime. All of Saturday, 4:30, is overtime. That is 8:58 (8.97 hours) of overtime. Pay: $980.00 straight, $329.53 overtime, $1,309.53 gross.

Under California’s rule, the daily tiers come first. Monday has 0:06 over 8 hours, Tuesday 2:15 and Thursday 2:30, so 4:51 (4.85 hours) is daily overtime. The weekly count then adds only straight-time minutes. Those reach 40:00 partway through Saturday: 0:23 of Saturday is straight time and 4:07 (4.12 hours) is weekly overtime. Total overtime is again 8:58, and gross pay is again $1,309.53.

The total matches because the week is long. Every daily-overtime minute would have been weekly overtime anyway, and no-pyramiding stops the same minute from being paid twice. The split differs, and that matters when you check a pay stub line by line.

Now drop Friday and Saturday from the same card, so the week is Monday through Thursday only: 36:31 (36.52 hours).

Here daily overtime changes the paycheck, because the week never reaches 40 hours. California’s $954.07 is $775.83 for 31:40 (31.67 hours) of straight time plus $178.24 for the 4:51 of overtime. None of that overtime is required by the FLSA, so none of it counts toward the 2025–2028 federal overtime deduction, which covers only the premium on FLSA-required overtime, only for federal income tax, and only up to a yearly cap.

If your pay doesn’t match

A difference between your stub and a calculation is a reason to ask, not a conclusion. Start with the facts that change the answer:

• Which workweek your employer uses. Ask for the start day and hour. A different start can move hours between weeks.
• Your status and coverage. Exempt employees do not get overtime, and some industries are excluded from a state rule. Your employer decides your classification first. The state labor department or the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division decides a dispute.
• The conditions in your state’s row. These include employer size in Alaska, your rate, schedule agreement and employer sales in Nevada, and the type of workplace in Oregon.
• Your regular rate. Bonuses and differentials raise it, and with it every overtime hour.

Under the rules as written, the calculation shows which hours would be overtime. If your pay doesn’t match, ask your employer first. Your state labor department, or the Wage and Hour Division at 1-866-487-9243, can look into it. Each row in the state table names the agency.

Next step

Enter your own week, pick your state, and answer its questions in the overtime calculator. It applies the state’s daily, weekly and seventh-day rules, computes the federal result alongside, keeps whichever pays more, and shows the split day by day.