Published • Mar 2025
A few weeks ago I was helping a friend figure out a paycheck stub. They’d worked 46 hours at $18/hour, and the employer had paid straight time for everything—no overtime bump. We both knew that wasn’t right, but when I tried to calculate what they should have earned, I made a dumb mistake: I multiplied the extra 6 hours by 1.5, but I forgot to add back the regular 40-hour pay.
I felt like an idiot. It’s just multiplication and addition. But that’s the thing—when you’re checking numbers after a long day, or you’re an employer trying to generate a quick estimate, it’s annoyingly easy to slip up. A calculator should just do this.
There are plenty of overtime calculators out there, but most of them either:
I wanted something dead simple: hourly rate, regular hours, overtime hours. Hit calculate. No extra noise. No “enter your email to see the result.”
It’s a straightforward calculator. You type in your hourly wage, the number of regular hours you worked (usually 40, but some folks have different baselines), and how many overtime hours you put in. It instantly shows:
That’s it. No graphs, no PDF export, no life advice. Just a tool that saves two minutes and a potential headache.
I’m using it for my own freelance invoices now—I often work mixed hours on different projects, and this keeps me honest. If you’re an employee double-checking a check or a small business owner estimating labor cost, it’ll do the same for you.