Overtime and extra hours
Overtime is where hourly pay most often goes wrong, and it is also the easiest error to prove — provided you recorded it as overtime at the time, rather than folding it into a single figure for the day.
The one rule that matters
Never merge overtime into your normal hours. Record a day that ran from 08:00 to 19:00 as eight normal hours plus three hours of overtime, not as eleven hours.
The reason is arithmetic. If normal time and premium time are paid at different rates, a single total cannot be checked against a payslip without knowing the split — and by the time the payslip arrives you will not remember the split. Two numbers recorded at the time cost nothing extra. One number recorded at the time is unverifiable forever.
This is why a working event in Working Hours 4b keeps the normal interval and the overtime as separate parts of the same day, each with its own pay, rather than storing one start time and one end time.
What counts as overtime
This is contractual, not universal, and it is worth reading your own contract for the exact wording. In practice, three definitions are common:
| Trigger | Meaning | Common in |
|---|---|---|
| Daily threshold | Anything beyond the scheduled shift length on a given day | Fixed-shift work, manufacturing, healthcare |
| Weekly threshold | Anything beyond a weekly figure, regardless of how the days fall | Salaried-hourly hybrids, many national frameworks |
| Authorised only | Extra hours count only if approved in advance | Office and project environments |
The third is the one that catches people out. Under an authorisation rule, hours you genuinely worked can be legitimately unpaid because nobody approved them. If you work somewhere like this, the practical response is to record the hours anyway and note whether approval was given and by whom. An unpaid hour you can point to is a conversation; an unpaid hour you cannot reconstruct is nothing.
Overtime is not the same as an unsocial-hours premium
These get conflated constantly and they are different things:
- Overtime is about quantity — hours beyond a threshold.
- Unsocial-hours premiums (night, weekend, public holiday) are about timing — when the hours fell, regardless of how many there were.
They stack. A Sunday night shift that also runs past its scheduled end can attract a weekend premium, a night premium and an overtime rate at once, and the order in which those are applied is set by your contract or collective agreement. If you work in an environment with several premiums, record the timing facts (which day, which hours) rather than trying to compute a blended rate yourself — the computation is the employer's job, and your record exists to check it, not to replace it.
How multipliers usually work
Premium rates are normally expressed as a multiple of the base hourly rate — 1.25×, 1.5×, 2× are the common ones. Two details cause most of the confusion:
The multiplier applies to the base rate, not to your average rate. If your base is 12.00 and you also receive a 1.00 shift allowance, overtime at 1.5× is normally 18.00, not 19.50 — unless your contract says the allowance is included in the calculation base. Contracts vary on this, and it is worth knowing which yours does, because over a year of regular overtime the difference is not small.
Some agreements pay the premium only on the excess. Under a "time and a half after 8 hours" rule, a 10-hour day is 8 hours at 1× and 2 hours at 1.5×, not 10 hours at 1.5×. Recording the split makes this checkable; recording a single 10-hour figure does not.
Worked example. Base rate 14.00. A week of five 8-hour days plus 6 hours of overtime at 1.5×, of which 3 hours fell on Sunday with a further 0.5× weekend premium applied to the base. Normal: 40 × 14.00 = 560.00. Weekday overtime: 3 × 21.00 = 63.00. Sunday overtime: 3 × (14.00 × 1.5 + 14.00 × 0.5) = 3 × 28.00 = 84.00. Total 707.00. If your payslip says 686.00, the missing 21.00 is exactly one hour of weekday overtime — and because you kept the split, you can say so precisely instead of asking them to "check the overtime".
Paid or banked?
Extra hours are not always paid out. Many employers offer, or impose, time off in lieu: the hours accumulate as a balance you draw down later. This is a genuinely different thing from paid overtime and needs to be recorded differently, because banked hours have a lifecycle — they are earned, they sit as a balance, they get spent, and in many schemes they expire.
The hour bank guide covers this in detail. The short version: if the hours are going into a bank rather than onto a payslip, say so in the record at the moment you work them, because "was that October Saturday paid or banked?" is not a question anyone can answer six months later.
Checking overtime on a payslip
A quick routine that catches most errors:
- Compare hours before money. Does the overtime hours figure on the payslip match your record? If not, the problem is in the hours, and the rate question is premature.
- Check the rate on one line. Divide the overtime pay by the overtime hours. It should equal base × multiplier. If it does not, the discrepancy is systematic and will be present every month.
- Check the period boundary. Overtime worked in the last days of a month is often paid in the following month's payslip. A "missing" figure is very frequently a timing difference rather than an error — check the next payslip before raising it.
That third point is worth internalising, because raising a discrepancy that turns out to be a cut-off date costs you credibility for the next one, which might be real.
Regular overtime is a signal
One last thing that a good record gives you and a payslip does not. If you total your overtime across a year and it comes to several hundred hours, that is not a payroll fact — it is a workload fact. Regular, sustained overtime usually means the schedule is understaffed rather than that individual weeks were unusually busy. That is a conversation worth having, and it is a much better conversation when you can open it with an annual figure rather than an impression.