How to Calculate Overtime Pay: Time-and-a-Half, Double-Time, and the Rules That Actually Apply

Most people know overtime "pays more," but almost nobody can state the exact number they are owed. That gap is expensive. A payslip that quietly multiplies extra hours by the wrong rate, or that buries them inside a flat monthly salary, can short you hundreds of yuan a month and you would never notice. The fix is not a lawyer on day one — it is arithmetic you can do in under a minute once you know which multiplier attaches to which hour.

This guide walks through how overtime pay is calculated: the hourly base wage, the time-and-a-half (1.5×) tier, the double-rate and higher premium tiers, and how to combine regular and overtime pay into a single total you can verify against your own payslip.

Start With the Hourly Base Wage

Every overtime calculation begins with one number: your hourly base wage. If you are paid by the hour already, this is trivial. If you are on a monthly salary, you have to convert it, and the conversion is where most errors creep in.

The legal formula in China divides your monthly salary by the average paid working days in a month and then by 8 hours:

hourly base wage = monthly salary ÷ (21.75 × 8)

The 21.75 figure is not arbitrary. It equals (365 days − 104 rest days) ÷ 12 months — the average number of paid working days per month after weekends are removed. Statutory holidays are not subtracted, because employers must pay you for them anyway. Divide a 10,000 yuan salary by 30 instead and you get 41.67 per hour; divide by 21.75 × 8 and you get 57.47 — a 38% difference that lands entirely in your employer's favor if you let the wrong number stand. If you want to sanity-check your own figure, the salary-to-hourly converter does the same division for any pay period.

Time-and-a-Half: The 1.5× Rule

The first and most common premium is time-and-a-half. When you extend a normal workday past 8 hours — the classic "stayed until 9pm on a Tuesday" — those extra hours are paid at 150% of your base rate. The formula is short:

overtime pay = hourly rate × 1.5 × overtime hours

In the United States this same 1.5× rate kicks in after a 40-hour week under the Fair Labor Standards Act: hours 41 and beyond are time-and-a-half. The threshold differs (a daily 8-hour line in China, a weekly 40-hour line in the US), but the multiplier is identical, which is why "time-and-a-half" is the one overtime term almost everyone recognizes.

Here is the rule that catches people out: weekday extension must be paid in cash. Your employer cannot hand you a day off in exchange. Only one category of overtime — rest-day work, below — can be swapped for paid comp time at all.

A Worked Example: 45 Hours at $20 an Hour

Numbers make this concrete. Suppose you earn 20 per hour and work 45 hours in a week where the threshold is 40. The first 40 hours are regular pay; the 5 hours past 40 are overtime at time-and-a-half.

• Regular pay: 40 hours × 20 = 800
• Overtime pay: 5 hours × (20 × 1.5) = 5 × 30 = 150
• Total pay: 800 + 150 = 950

So 45 hours at 20 an hour is not 45 × 20 = 900. It is 950, because those last 5 hours are worth 30 each, not 20. That 50 difference is the entire point of overtime law, and it is exactly the gap a wrong divisor or a flat-salary payslip erases. Run the same inputs through the overtime pay calculator and it splits the regular and premium portions for you, so you can place each line item against your actual pay stub.

Double-Time and the Higher Tiers

Time-and-a-half is the floor, not the ceiling. Working on a scheduled rest day — a Saturday or Sunday — that cannot be offset with comp time pays 200%, or double-time. And working on one of the 11 named statutory holidays pays 300%, triple the base rate, with no comp-time substitution allowed at all.

The distinction between these tiers is where real money is lost or over-claimed:

• Double-time (2×) applies to genuine rest-day work, including the "bridge" Saturdays the calendar forces you to work to extend a holiday. A swapped Saturday is still a rest day, not a holiday — it pays 2×, not 3×.
• Triple pay (3×) applies only to the actual statutory holidays themselves: New Year, the three Spring Festival days, Qingming, Labor Day, Dragon Boat, Mid-Autumn, and the three National Day dates.

Confusing the two cuts both ways. Claim 3× for a bridge Saturday and your employer rebuts it instantly; accept 2× for a real Spring Festival shift and you have just handed back a third of what you were owed. Over three holiday days on a 5,000 yuan salary, the difference between a mistaken 2× and the correct 3× is roughly 276 yuan — small per shift, but it repeats every holiday season.

Adding Regular and Overtime Into One Total

Once each hour sits in the right bucket, the grand total is simple addition:

total = regular pay + 1.5× overtime + 2× overtime + 3× overtime

In practice a heavy month mixes tiers. Picture a "996" stretch — 9am to 9pm, six days a week — on a 12,000 yuan salary. That is about 60 hours of weekday extension at 1.5× and 40 rest-day hours at 2×, all computed off an hourly base near 68.97 yuan. Summed, the overtime owed lands above 11,000 yuan for the month. Walking into an HR meeting with that figure is a different conversation than "I think you owe me something."

I learned to do this the slow way. Early in my working life I took a payslip at face value for the better part of a year, assuming the lump sum already "included overtime." It did not — the company had divided my salary by 30 and called weekend shifts comp time. When I finally ran the real divisor and split the hours by tier, the shortfall was obvious in about two minutes. The lesson stuck: never argue overtime as a feeling, argue it as a total you can reproduce line by line.

Before You Raise It

Two habits make any overtime claim hold up. First, keep your own attendance record — timestamped chat screenshots, clock-in logs, anything that fixes the hours independently of the company's system. Second, run the math yourself before the meeting so you arrive with a specific number, not a grievance.

The mechanics never change: find the hourly base wage, attach 1.5× to weekday extension, 2× to rest-day work, 3× to statutory holidays, and add the regular pay back on top. Get those four pieces right and the total takes care of itself.

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Made by Toolora · Updated 2026-06-13