How overtime works in Kansas

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 Kansas adds on top of that floor, and — more importantly for Kansas — exactly where it stops applying.

Kansas’s own overtime rule comes from K.S.A. 44-1204. It sets a weekly threshold of 46 hours, not 40 — a number that looks, on its face, like Kansas asking for less than the federal floor already requires. It doesn’t: the statute is written so that it never actually competes with the FLSA. Read on for exactly what that means.

K.S.A. 44-1204(a) states plainly: “no employer shall employ any employee for a workweek longer than 46 hours, unless such employee receives compensation for employment in excess of 46 hours in a workweek at a rate of not less than 1½ times the hourly wage rate at which such employee is regularly employed.” Read alone, that sentence sounds like a standalone Kansas overtime rule sitting next to the federal one. It isn’t — subsection (c)(1) removes it entirely for anyone the FLSA already covers: the statute “shall not apply to the employment of… any employee who is covered under the provisions of section 7 of the fair labor standards act of 1938 as amended, 29 U.S.C.A. § 207.”

That narrow gap is still worth tracking precisely, not waving away. A differing statutory threshold doesn’t stop being a real rule just because the federal floor is tighter for most employers — it is the operative overtime rule for whichever employment relationships genuinely fall outside the FLSA’s coverage, and it has to be applied correctly there rather than assumed away. This guide does not attempt to define which employers or employees fall outside FLSA coverage — that determination turns on the federal statute’s own coverage tests, not on anything Kansas law adds — only what happens once that determination has been made.

K.S.A. 44-1204 carves out a few more categories beyond the FLSA-coverage exclusion above. None of these is a general-purpose exemption — each is conditional on the category stated:

Take two nonexempt employees, each paid $18.00/hour, each working an identical 44-hour week — the only difference is which employer they work for, and whether that employment is covered by the FLSA:

Had Employee B instead worked 47.0 hoursin the week — 1.0 hour past the Kansas threshold — K.S.A. 44-1204(a) would then require 1.5× pay for that excess hour: 46.0 hours at $18.00 ($828.00) plus 1.0 hour at $27.00 ($27.00), for $855.00 total. The 46-hour line only starts to matter once an employee not covered by the FLSA actually crosses it — nothing changes for Employee A’s situation either way, because the federal 40-hour rule already governs that employment regardless of what Kansas’s own threshold is set to.

A rule that only switches on for the narrow band of employment the federal law doesn’t already reach is exactly the kind of scope condition that gets flattened into a blanket assumption when it’s worked out by hand. In A Tick models Kansas’s rule as a configured region rule keyed to the FLSA-coverage boundary you set for a role, rather than a single fixed 46-hour or 40-hour switch, and its overtime calculation engine applies the correct threshold to the actual clock times logged for the week, 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 threshold governs a given role: 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.