Work Hours & Overtime Tracker

What this tool does

This tracker ingests a Monday-through-Sunday timesheet with clock-in and clock-out pairs, unpaid breaks, optional auto-deducted meals after long shifts, and per-shift pay rates when they differ from your default. Behind the scenes it applies federal baseline logic—weekly overtime after 40 hours worked—and layers state-specific daily thresholds for California (including double time after twelve hours), Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado as you select them from the work-state menu. Anti-pyramiding ensures hours credited as daily overtime are not counted again inside the weekly overtime bucket, which mirrors how many compliance teams explain the sequencing verbally. A weighted average regular rate is derived from straight-time pay divided by total hours so blended wage scenarios still produce a defensible overtime estimate before payroll runs the official calc.

Who should use it

Restaurant GMs scheduling doubles, healthcare-adjacent hourly staff, warehouse leads, and any operator who hears “Did we owe OT on Tuesday?” will use this weekly. HR coordinators can compare a federal-only employee against a multi-state traveler, while workers themselves can sanity-check schedules before escalating questions. It is explicitly not a substitute for counsel or certified payroll software—disclaimers on the page remind you that industry agreements, union contracts, and local orders can override generic rules—but it closes the gap between a scribbled timesheet and a payroll preview. Pair it with the paycheck calculator when you need take-home pay after gross hours are settled.

How to use it

Pick the state that governs daily overtime routing, enter a default hourly rate, and toggle meal auto-deduct if your policy assumes a thirty-minute unpaid break once shifts cross five hours after manual break entries. Fill each day’s rows with in/out times; add break minutes where employees actually leave the clock. Override rates on individual rows when someone works a premium station. Watch the dashboard populate regular, daily 1.5x, daily 2x, weekly OT, and estimated gross. Scroll the daily detail table to verify how each weekday split its hours before trusting the headline numbers. Reset the week when you move to a new pay period rather than editing over old data.

Example

A California cook works ten hours Monday, nine Tuesday, eight Wednesday, eight Thursday, and seven Friday, all at $22/hour with no split shifts. Monday and Tuesday each spill one and two hours respectively into daily overtime at time-and-a-half before the engine sums remaining daily-regular hours toward the forty-hour federal cap. If weekly regular hours still exceed forty after daily OT is carved out, additional hours move to weekly overtime rather than being taxed twice. Seeing the table row-by-row explains why Friday’s seventh hour might still be “regular” even late in the week—because earlier days already shed OT hours into their own buckets. Export the mental model to your payroll partner when actual checks diverge slightly due to rounding or employer-specific rounding rules.