Overtime Rules in the United States

Not every threshold on this page is fixed by national law in the United States. The figures above are what the statute sets; where one is marked as not set nationally, the point at which overtime begins, or the rate it is paid at, comes from the employment contract, the collective agreement or sector rules instead.

An empty figure is information rather than an omission. Read the source linked below before applying any of these numbers to a specific contract in the United States.

No maximum weekly hours figure is listed for the United States: the statute cited below does not set one as a weekly ceiling. Daily limits, annual overtime caps and minimum rest periods may still apply, so read the source before planning long weeks.

No statutory rest break with a fixed hours threshold is recorded for the United States in the source cited below. Break entitlements may still come from the collective agreement or from sector rules. Either way, unpaid breaks are excluded from paid hours, which is how the hours calculator treats the break field by default.

Select the United States in the hours calculator or the timesheet and these thresholds and the 1.5× multiplier are applied to your week automatically. Overtime hours are shown on their own line rather than folded into the total, so the figure can be checked against the statute.