How the wage calculations work
Each state page identifies the work dates and employment categories its calculator supports. Choosing a state does not establish legal coverage. A required confirmation records the assumptions you have checked; it does not verify them for you.
Ordinary full-cash weekly pay
For a single regular hourly rate with overtime after 40 hours, employer pay is:
hourly rate × all worked hours + hourly rate × 0.5 × hours above 40.
At $15 and 45 hours, that is $675 + $37.50 = $712.50. The homepage uses this ordinary full-cash method with a rate you enter. Its result does not determine whether that rate satisfies a state or local minimum.
Tip credits and employer shortfall payments
For an eligible ordinary tip-credit case, base employer cash is worked hours times the full rate minus the permitted hourly credit. The overtime premium uses the full regular rate before the credit. Retained tips are added separately. If those tips do not support the credit, the employer cash adjustment fills the shortfall.
For example, at a $7.25 floor, $5.12 credit, 40 hours and $100 tips, initial employer cash is $85.20. The adjustment is $104.80. Employer cash becomes $190 and combined gross is $290. This example does not establish eligibility for a credit in any particular job. Federal tipped employee rules.
Some states need different calculations: Massachusetts reconciles each entered shift; Hawaii limits its credit using the required earnings buffer; New York adds occupation-specific eligibility thresholds and applicable spread-of-hours cash. Those pages explain their separate inputs.
Overtime is not always a 40-hour weekly test
The state calculators implement their stated daily, consecutive-hour, seventh-day, retail-premium or special weekly thresholds. Hours qualifying under overlapping ordinary daily and weekly rules are not automatically paid twice. California, Colorado, Oregon and Rhode Island illustrate different calculations.
Daily inputs must use the employer’s fixed workday boundaries. A week spanning multiple rates, jurisdictions or an unsupported special arrangement requires a separate calculation. Bonuses, commissions, service charges and deductions are excluded from these floor scenarios.
Publication dates and source history
“First documented” identifies the earliest exact-path addition in this site's source history. It is not a verified first deployment or Google crawl date. The visible updated/verified date records the current content review and matches the sitemap last modification. A no-op rebuild does not advance it.
Dates and future increases
A calculator rejects dates outside its reviewed interval. Where a dated schedule is implemented, it selects the rule in force on the entered work date. Published successors and enacted structural changes are implemented for their stated dates. Where an indexed amount has not been independently reconciled, the form requires that precise official rate and, where applicable, eligible tipped cash; it does not estimate inflation.
A single work date represents one rate period for the whole entered week. Do not use it for a week crossing an effective-date boundary. Entered weeks annualize that one weekly scenario; they do not build a calendar-year payroll across rate changes.
Rounding and annualization
Intermediate hourly calculations preserve decimal precision, including South Dakota’s half-cent tipped cash. Monetary outputs round to cents. Annual gross repeats the rounded weekly gross for the entered number of weeks; monthly average divides the resulting annual gross by 12. Displayed component rounding may cause a one-cent difference when adding separately rounded amounts.
Fractional hours and zero-work scenarios are accepted within the form’s limits. Blank, negative, impossible or unsupported entries produce an explanation instead of a pay result. These estimates do not compute taxes, take-home pay, benefits or housing affordability.
Validation and corrections
State pages cite the primary statutes, agency guidance and local schedules used for their models. Browser checks exercise the calculations shipped with the built pages, including dated boundaries and state-specific examples. Passing checks supports those tested scenarios; it does not cover every legal exception or guarantee that published guidance will never change.
Report a correction with an anonymized workweek and primary citation. A receipt records storage, not verification of a proposed interpretation.
Review the source directory or choose a state calculator.
Updated First published