How overtime works in Kentucky

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 Kentucky adds on top of that floor.

Kentucky has no state daily-overtime rule and no state weekly threshold that differs from the federal 40 hours. What it does have is KRS 337.050: a rule keyed to which calendar day of the workweek an hour falls on, not to how many hours have accumulated. An employer who permits an employee to work all seven days of a workweek must pay 1.5×for the time worked on that seventh day — regardless of how many total hours were worked that week, subject to the exception below.

KRS 337.050(1) provides: “Any employer who permits any employee to work seven (7) days in any one (1) workweek shall pay him at the rate of time and a half for the time worked on the seventh day.” The statute defines “workweek” as a calendar week or any other fixed, recurring period of seven consecutive days the employer adopts as its workweek in good faith — not one shifted opportunistically to dodge the rule.

The trigger is which day it is, not how many hours have been worked. A short 4-hour shift on the seventh consecutive day is paid entirely at 1.5×, in full, because it is the seventh day — not because any hour threshold was crossed that day or that week. A daily-overtime rule pays a premium once an employee’s hours on a given day cross a threshold; Kentucky’s rule instead pays a premium for an entire day’s hours because of which day of the workweek it is — the two are different mechanisms even though both can produce a 1.5× outcome.

KRS 337.050(2)(a) removes the premium entirely in one specific circumstance: “Subsection (1) shall not apply in any case in which the employee is not permitted to work more than forty (40) hours during the workweek.” In other words, if an employer caps a seven-day schedule so the employee is never permitted to exceed 40 total hours for that workweek, no seventh-day premium is owed at all — even though the employee did work all seven days. The same subsection adds a narrow crediting rule for that capped case: the employer “may credit against the overtime payable under this section any overtime paid by him to the employees for the same hours under the requirements of any other law or contract” — so an employer is not exposed to paying twice for hours already compensated at an overtime rate under a separate law or agreement.

KRS 337.050(2)(b) and (3) exclude several further categories outright, regardless of hours worked:

Because KRS 337.050(2)(a) switches the premium off whenever the employee is not permitted to exceed 40 hours in the workweek, the seventh-day premium in practice only ever operates in a workweek where the employee is also permitted to work — and typically does work — more than 40 total hours. That does not mean the two rules always reach the exact same hours, though. The federal 40-hour rule counts cumulative hours for the week, regardless of which day they fall on; Kentucky’s rule counts which calendar day an hour falls on, regardless of the running weekly total at that point. An hour worked on the seventh day can therefore fall within what would otherwise be counted as the “first 40” hours of the week under a pure federal count, and still owe 1.5× under KRS 337.050 purely because of which day it was worked on.

What does not happen is a stacked, multiplied premium on the same hour — an hour is never paid at 1.5× under the federal rule and then 1.5× again on top of that. Where both rules would otherwise reach the identical hour (for example, an hour on the seventh day that also happens to fall past the 40-hour weekly mark), the hour is paid once, at 1.5×. The seventh-day rule’s practical effect is broader than that overlap, though: it can pull hours worked on the seventh day up to 1.5× even where those specific hours would have sat within the federal “first 40” bucket and so would have been straight-time under a federal-only calculation. The worked example below shows exactly where that happens. KRS 337.050 itself only spells out a crediting mechanism for the narrower 40-hour-cap exception case above; it does not include a general anti-pyramiding clause for weeks where the 40-hour threshold is exceeded. Confirm this specific interaction against current Kentucky Labor Cabinet guidance or counsel before relying on it for payroll in an edge case.

A nonexempt employee paid $20.00/hour is permitted to work all seven days of the workweek: six 6-hour days (Monday through Saturday, 36.0 hours) followed by an 8.0-hour shift on Sunday, the seventh consecutive day. Total hours worked for the week: 44.0. Because the employee was permitted to work more than 40 hours, the KRS 337.050(2)(a) exception does not apply, and the seventh-day premium is owed in full.

Compare that to what a federal-only calculation would have produced for the identical 44.0-hour week: 40.0 hours at the $20.00 straight rate ($800.00) plus 4.0 hours of weekly overtime past the 40-hour mark at $30.00 ($120.00), for $920.00 total. The seventh-day premium adds $40.00 more — the difference comes from the 4.0 hours of Sunday’s shift that a pure federal count would place within the “first 40” hours of the week (and so pay at straight time), but which KRS 337.050 still pays at 1.5× because they were worked on the seventh consecutive day. The remaining 4.0 hours of Sunday’s shift already sit past the 40-hour mark either way, so both rules would reach them at 1.5× regardless — that overlap is paid once, not twice.

Now contrast a capped schedule where the 40-hour exception applies: the same employee is instead scheduled across all seven days for exactly 40.0 hours total — for example, seven shifts averaging just under 5.75 hours each. Because the employee was not permitted to work more than 40 hours in that workweek, KRS 337.050(2)(a)’s exception applies: no seventh-day premium is owed at all, even though all seven days were worked. Pay for the week is 40.0 hours at the straight $20.00 rate, $800.00 total — identical to what the federal 40-hour rule alone would require.

A premium keyed to which calendar day of the workweek was worked, rather than to an hour threshold, is exactly the kind of rule that gets missed by a payroll process built only around counting weekly totals. In A Tick models Kentucky’s rule as a configured region rule that recognises the seventh consecutive day worked in the configured workweek and applies the 1.5× premium to every hour logged on it, while independently tracking the federal 40-hour threshold and the 40-hour-cap exception — so the correct rule always fires and no hour is paid twice. Its overtime calculation engine applies these rules 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 rules apply to a given team: 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.