How overtime works in California

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 California adds on top of that floor.

California’s overtime rules come from Cal. Labor Code § 510and the Industrial Welfare Commission’s Wage Orders, enforced by the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) within the state’s Department of Industrial Relations. Unlike the federal floor, California measures overtime by the day as well as the week, and adds a double-time tier and a seventh-day rule the FLSA does not have at all. Nonexempt employees cannot waive these rights by agreement, and the overtime is owed whether or not the extra hours were formally authorised in advance, so long as the employer knew or should have known the work was being done.

California layers four distinct triggers on top of (never instead of) the federal 40-hour week. Each is a separate leg of the same rule, and none of them cancels out the others — an employee’s pay for a given week is whichever combination actually applies to the hours worked:

The first divergence from the federal floor is that California counts overtime by the workday, not only the workweek. Under the DLSE’s Overtime FAQ and Cal. Lab. Code § 510(a), a nonexempt employee is owed one and one-half times their regular rate of pay for all hours worked in excess of 8 hours, up to and including 12 hours, in any workday. Push past 12 hours in that same workday and the rate steps up again to double the regular rate for every hour beyond the 12th.

On top of the daily tiers, California also keeps the familiar weekly trigger: 1.5× the regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, mirroring the federal floor but applied in addition to, not instead of, the daily tiers above.

The two measures do not stack on the same hour. Cal. Lab. Code § 510(a) is explicit that “nothing in this section requires an employer to combine more than one rate of overtime compensation in order to calculate the amount to be paid to an employee for any hour of overtime work.” In practice this means an hour already paid at a daily premium is not paid again as weekly overtime — but if, after the daily and seventh-day hours are accounted for, the remaining hours worked that week still exceed 40, those excess hours are owed the 1.5× weekly rate too. The worked example below shows exactly how that plays out.

The fourth leg is unique to California among the divergent states: if an employer permits or requires an employee to work all seven daysof the employer’s established workweek, the seventh consecutive day carries its own premium — independent of whether that day’s hours alone would trigger the ordinary daily tiers above.

Take a nonexempt employee paid $25.00/hour who works all seven days of a single established workweek, with no bonuses or other pay folded into the regular rate:

Before applying the weekly trigger, the hours already paid at a daily or seventh-day premium are set aside: 1 (Mon) + 4 (Tue) + 5 (Sun) = 10 hours at OT1, and 1 hour (Tue) at OT2. That leaves 48 hours still at the base rate (8 hours on each of Mon–Sat). Because 48 exceeds the 40-hour weekly threshold, the excess 8 hours convert to weekly overtime at 1.5× — without double-counting any hour already paid a premium:

Notice what the anti-pyramiding rule actually buys the employer here: the 10 hours already paid a daily or seventh-day premium are not paid a second time as weekly overtime — only the leftover 8 hours that were still sitting at the base rate convert to the weekly 1.5× tier. Nothing in this example is paid twice, and nothing is left unpaid.

Four interacting triggers — daily, double-time, weekly and the seventh-day rule — is exactly the kind of calculation that goes wrong when it is worked out by hand, week after week, across a whole team. In A Tick models California’s rules as configured region rules, and its overtime calculation engine buckets every logged 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 day of the week or how many hours a shift runs: 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.