How overtime works in Colorado

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 Colorado adds on top of that floor.

Colorado’s overtime rules come from the Colorado Overtime and Minimum Pay Standards (COMPS) Order — currently COMPS Order #40, at 7 CCR 1103-1, effective 1 February 2026 — issued by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) under the Colorado Wage Act. Unlike a state that simply adds a flat daily threshold, Colorado runs three separate overtime tests for the same workweek and pays whichever one produces the most overtime pay — never more than one, and never less.

Under 7 CCR 1103-1-4, a covered employee is owed 1.5× the regular rate of pay for hours worked in excess of the greatest of three thresholds:

A workdayunder 7 CCR 1103-1-1 is “any consecutive 24-hour period starting with the same hour each day and the same hour as the beginning of the workweek” — a fixed period the employer sets once, not a floating midnight-to-midnight clock. Test B applies the familiar shape of daily overtime to that fixed period: 1.5× for hours worked over 12 within it.

Test C exists to close a gap that a workday-only rule leaves open. If a shift straddles the boundary between one fixed workday and the next, hours can split across two workdays on paper while the employee is, in reality, working one continuous long stretch. Test C catches that: 1.5× for hours worked over 12 consecutive hours, counted from when the continuous work actually started, irrespective of where the fixed workday boundary falls. Meal periods may be subtracted from that 12-consecutive-hour count, but only where the break itself meets Colorado’s meal-period requirements.

Test A is the same shape as the federal floor: 1.5× for hours worked over 40 in a workweek — “any consecutive set period of 168 hours (7 days) starting with the same calendar day and hour each week” (7 CCR 1103-1-1). It applies even in weeks where no single shift is long enough to trigger the daily or 12-consecutive-hour tests — several ordinary-length days can still add up past 40.

7 CCR 1103-1-4 is explicit that hours cannot be smoothed out to avoid this test: “ hours worked in two or more workweeks shall not be averaged for computing overtime.” A heavy week and a light week cannot be blended into two ordinary-looking weeks after the fact — each workweek is tested on its own hours.

Overtime earned under any of the three tests is owed as wages, not banked hours: a Colorado employer cannot substitute paid time off later for the overtime premium a nonexempt employee has already earned, and an employee cannot waive the right to it by agreement. Whichever of the three tests produces the largest overtime figure for the week is the one that governs — it is not something an employer or employee gets to opt out of shift by shift.

Take a nonexempt employee paid $28.00/hour, whose employer’s fixed workday runs midnight to midnight. In one workweek:

Run all three tests against this week:

Had the employer instead scheduled the same 13 hours entirely within a single fixed workday — say, 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM — tests B and C would have agreed from the start, both showing 1.0 hour of overtime. The 12-consecutive-hour rule exists precisely so that where the shift falls relative to the fixed workday clock does not change what the employee is owed.

Three overtime tests running side by side, with the largest result winning and no double-counting, is exactly the kind of calculation that goes wrong when it is worked out by hand — especially once a single shift crosses a fixed workday boundary. In A Tick models Colorado’s rules as configured region rules, and its overtime calculation engine runs all three 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 test 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.