How overtime works in Alaska

This guide assumes you already know the federal baseline: the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets a nationwide floor of time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a workweek, with no federal daily trigger. If you need that baseline first, see the federal FLSA overtime guide — it is not repeated here. Everything below is what Alaska adds on top of that floor.

Alaska’s overtime rules come from the Alaska Wage and Hour Act, at AS 23.10.060, administered by the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development’s Wage and Hour Administration. Unlike the federal floor, Alaska measures overtime by the day as well as the week — but it does not add a double-time tier or a seventh-day rule on top of that. The two Alaska triggers work together with a built-in anti-pyramiding rule so the same hour is never paid overtime twice.

Under AS 23.10.060(a), a covered employer “may not employ an employee for a workweek longer than 40 hours or for more than eight hours a day” without paying one and one-half timesthe employee’s regular rate of pay for the excess hours:

The two triggers do not pyramid. AS 23.10.060(a) is explicit that when checking whether an employee has worked more than 40 hours in the week, the count excludes “hours that are worked in excess of eight hours in a day because the employee has or will be separately awarded overtime compensation based on those hours.” In practice: hours already paid at the daily 1.5× rate are set aside before the weekly 40-hour test runs, so the same hour is never paid overtime under both triggers at once — the employer pays the greater result, not the sum of both. The worked example below shows exactly how that plays out.

Two statutory exceptions narrow how far AS 23.10.060 actually reaches, and both matter for anyone assuming the daily rule is universal.

Small employers.AS 23.10.060(d) exempts “an employee employed by an employer employing fewer than four employees in the regular course of business” from the section’s overtime requirements entirely — not just the daily trigger. An employer this small does not owe Alaska statutory overtime under either the daily or the weekly test (the federal 40-hour rule may still apply independently, where the FLSA covers the employer).

Voluntary flexible work-hour plan. AS 23.10.060(d) also exempts “work performed by an employee under a voluntary flexible work hour plan” where the employee and employer have signed a written agreement, that agreement has been filed with the department, and the department has issued a certificate approving a plan that states the work is for 40 hours a week and not more than 10 hours a day— the statutory example being a 10-hour, 4-day workweek. Under an approved plan, the 8-hour daily trigger is suspended up to the plan’s approved daily hours; overtime resumes once the employee exceeds the hours the certificate actually approves (typically 10 in a day), or exceeds 40 in the week. This is a specific, department- certified arrangement — not a blanket right for an employer to reschedule hours and skip daily overtime unilaterally.

AS 23.10.060(d) also lists specific occupational categories exempt from the section’s overtime requirements. Several are conditional, not blanket carve-outs — don’t overstate their reach:

Take a nonexempt employee paid $30.00/hour, not covered by any of the exceptions above, across one workweek:

Now apply the weekly 40-hour test. AS 23.10.060(a) says the 3.0 hours already awarded daily overtime are excluded from that count:

Had the employee instead worked an additional hour somewhere — say, 9.0 hours on Friday instead of 8.0, for 44.0 total — the weekly test would then find 44.0 − 3.0 = 41.0 hours remaining, 1.0 hour over the 40-hour mark, and that 1.0 hour would convert to weekly overtime on top of the 3.0 daily hours. The weekly trigger only bites once hours remain above 40 after the daily-overtime hours are set aside.

Two overtime triggers that must not pyramid — where the hours behind one test have to be set aside before the other test can run — is exactly the kind of calculation that goes wrong when it is worked out by hand, week after week. In A Tick models Alaska’s rules as configured region rules, and its overtime calculation engine runs the daily and weekly tests against the actual clock times logged for the week and buckets every minute into the correct rate code — deterministically, so the same timesheet always produces the same result. Pay is never left to guesswork or to AI.

What In A Tick enforces regardless of which trigger governs a given week: 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.