Am I owed overtime pay in California?

How California overtime actually works

California counts overtime by the day, not just the week, which is why so many nonexempt workers are underpaid without knowing it. For most nonexempt employees, Labor Code section 510 requires one and one-half times the regular rate for hours over eight in a workday and over forty in a workweek, and for the first eight hours on a seventh consecutive day of work in the same workweek. It requires double the regular rate for hours over twelve in a workday, and for hours past eight on that seventh consecutive day. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act only reaches the forty-hour week, so a nine-hour day that stays under forty for the week earns no federal overtime but can still earn California daily overtime.

There are exceptions, a valid alternative workweek schedule and certain collective-bargaining arrangements change these rules, so the daily and weekly limits are the starting point, not the whole story. The right to overtime also does not depend on your employer calling it overtime or approving it in advance. If the hours were worked and the employer knew or should have known, the pay is generally owed.

Sources [1] · [2] · [3]

Your regular rate is more than your hourly wage

Overtime is a multiple of your regular rate of pay, and the regular rate is a legal term that is usually higher than your posted hourly wage. It generally includes nondiscretionary bonuses, shift differentials, commissions, and other earnings tied to production or performance, spread back across the hours you worked. When an employer pays overtime on the base hourly wage alone and ignores a monthly production bonus, every overtime hour that pay period can be short.

This is one of the most common and least visible wage errors, because the paycheck looks correct on its face. The only way to see it is to compare what your regular rate should have been, bonuses and commissions included, against the rate your overtime was actually paid on.

Sources [2] · [4]

A salary does not by itself make you exempt

Employers often treat a salaried title as proof that no overtime is owed. It is not. To fall within the common executive, administrative, or professional exemptions under California law, an employee generally has to be paid a true salary of at least twice the state minimum wage for full-time work and spend more than half their time on genuinely exempt duties. Both parts have to be true. A worker paid a modest salary who spends the day doing the same tasks as the hourly crew may well be misclassified and owed overtime.

The label on the job, the fact that you are paid twice a month, and a signed acknowledgment that you are exempt do not settle the question. The duties you actually perform and the salary you are actually paid do, and if no exemption fits, the overtime is owed.

Sources [5] · [2]

How long you have, and what you can recover

An unpaid-overtime claim in California is generally subject to a three-year limit, and a four-year period may apply when the same underpayment is pursued as an unfair business practice, depending on the remedy sought. What you may recover is the overtime you were underpaid and interest, and, where an employer willfully failed to pay all wages due at separation, a waiting-time penalty of up to thirty days' pay. When the same policy underpaid a whole crew or job title the same way, the claim is often brought as a class or representative action, so one worker coming forward can seek to recover for others paid under that policy, subject to the procedural and factual requirements that apply.

The clock generally runs from each underpaid paycheck, so waiting tends to cost you the oldest weeks first. Bringing your pay stubs, schedules, and any bonus or commission statements to a free review is enough for an attorney to see whether the math is off.

Sources [6] · [7] · [8]