How overtime works in Germany

In Germany, the federal statute governing working time is the Arbeitszeitgesetz(the “ArbZG”, Working Time Act). It is essential to understand what it does and does not regulate: the ArbZG sets limits on how long people may work — daily caps, rest periods, and days off — to protect health and safety. It says nothing about a premium rate for the hours worked within or beyond those limits.

The core limits every German employer must respect:

If you are arriving from a country with a national overtime multiplier, this is the single most important sentence in this guide: German federal law mandates no statutory overtime premium at all. There is no legal “time-and-a-half”, no statutory 25% or 50% loading for working late or long. The ArbZG limits how much you may work; it does not set a higher rate for the hours you do work.

Overtime pay in Germany — the Mehrarbeitszuschlag — exists only where a collective agreement (Tarifvertrag), works agreement, or an individual employment contract creates it. That means the premium, if any, is a matter of what your people signed, not what the statute book says. Two employers in the same city, same industry, can lawfully pay very different overtime — or none.

Because there is no statutory floor for a premium, the numbers come from the contractual layer. In practice a German overtime premium is set by one of:

There is one genuine statutory floor in play, but it is a floor on the base wage, not on the premium: the statutory minimum wage (Mindestlohn, set under the MiLoG). Overtime arrangements cannot push effective pay below it. The Mindestlohn rises on a published schedule set by the Mindestlohnkommission, so cite the schedule rather than a single figure that goes stale:

Because there is no statutory premium to tabulate, this worked example works differently: the real constraints are the ArbZG time limits, and any pay premium is whatever this employee's contract happens to say. Take a week where someone works long days on a contract that sets a conventional 25% Mehrarbeitszuschlag for hours beyond an agreed 40-hour week. The 25% here is illustrative and contractual — not a statutory rate.

The week totals 47 hours. On this employee's contract, 40 hours are ordinary and the 7 hours beyond 40 attract the conventional 25% Mehrarbeitszuschlag. Nothing in the statute produced that 25% — the contract did:

Because German overtime premiums are contractual rather than statutory, In A Tick does not ship a fixed German rate set the way it does for jurisdictions that have one. Instead you configure your own premiums — the Mehrarbeitszuschlag from your Tarifvertrag or contracts — as custom region rules, and the overtime calculation engine buckets and stacks them deterministically. The same timesheet always produces the same result: pay is never left to guesswork or to AI.

What In A Tick enforces regardless of what your premiums are: accurate capture of the hours actually worked from real clock times, a complete audit trail of how every figure was reached, and a deterministic, payroll-ready calculation you can hand to whoever runs pay. Those matter even where the law sets no premium floor — the numbers still have to be right, and defensible. We expect to help teams track the ArbZG working-time limits themselves down the line.