Exhaustive Explanation of Florida Overtime Laws

Each state can have its own set of overtime laws, which sometimes makes it complicated for you and your company to keep up. But if you want to make sure you’re complying with all federal and state laws and thus avoid any expensive mistakes, then you need to be informed.

That’s why we collected information on all the relevant Florida overtime laws on this page. Be sure to read it through and sign up for a free actiTIME trial to streamline overtime tracking.

What Are Florida Overtime Laws?

For the most part, Florida overtime laws look to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for its laws on overtime pay, with only the odd extra regulation or two. Before continuing below, it might help if you read our guide to learn how overtime works.

One of the first things to be aware of is the concept of the workweek. In Florida, a workweek is a period of seven days made up of 24 hours each, but it doesn’t have to be fixed to the calendar. A company’s workweek can start on Tuesday, Friday or whatever day makes sense to them. But once a company’s workweek has been established, it can’t be changed. However, different positions within one company can have different work weeks (cashiers and warehouse stockers, for example).

Federally speaking, overtime hours only begin after an employee has worked more than 40 hours in one workweek. Extra hours can’t carry over into the next week: a 50-hour week followed by a 30-hour week still means that an employee should be paid ten hours of overtime.

There are two ways to compensate Florida workers for overtime hours.

• Overtime pay: Employees receive 1.5x their regular pay for every hour of overtime work.
• Compensatory time: Employees receive 1.5 hours of paid time off for every hour of overtime work.

Only up to 240 hours of compensatory time can be saved up at once. After that, employers must pay overtime.

Except for nurses and paralegals, employers can ask employees to work overtime so long as they are compensated for it.

The time spent preparing and winding down from the workday is counted towards an employee’s total hours.

The same goes for the time spent between tasks and for waiting for a task to begin.

In Florida, employers can choose to pay for overtime done on weekends or holidays, but it is not obligatory.

How to Calculate Overtime Pay in Florida?

While all this may sound intimidating, overtime pay is easy to calculate once you’ve got the hang of it.

In Florida, if an employee works a job at minimum wage ($8.56 an hour as of Jan 1st, 2020), their overtime pay will amount to $12.84 an hour. A monthly paycheck might look like this:

Sometimes there may be additional requirements based on the city. Miami failed to pass a law to increase the minimum wage to $13.31 by 2021, but if legislation like this succeeds in the future, then employers will have to take this into account.

There are a couple more factors to keep in mind.

If your employees make a commission, then you’re going to have to do some additional calculations. This is particularly true for sales positions, as the commission can make up a large part of a worker’s salary.

Calculating someone’s regular pay comes down to combining the commission they’ve earned in a given week with their regular base salary. Then you divide that number by the hours worked that particular week. Here’s what that might look like if the worker has a base pay rate at minimum wage:

You can use the regular pay rate for a given week to calculate any overtime hours an employee has worked:

If workers make bonuses, particularly if they’re non-discretionary, then you may have to take them into account when you calculate their regular pay rate. First, you’ll have to take the period the bonus applies to and add the bonus to the total amount earned through a worker’s base pay. Then, you divide that number by how many hours they worked in that period. The figure you get will be their regular pay.

If the employee gets a monthly bonus of $1000 and their salary is a minimum wage, then the calculation will look like this for a 160-hour month:

Once the regular rate is calculated, you can then estimate the pay for any overtime hours a worker qualifies for in a given week that month.

Note that any time you need help with counting the overtime pay amounts, you can always make use of our overtime calculator. This tool is meant to assist you in doing complex math and is capable of producing highly accurate results. Besides, it is absolutely free.

Who Is Qualified for Overtime Pay in Florida?

Not all workers are guaranteed overtime pay by the FLSA. Overtime regulations were written with blue-collar workers in mind in order to protect them from exploitation.

In Florida, employees must meet at least one of two conditions if they want to claim overtime pay:

• Their weekly wage must be under $455 a week, or $23,660 a year;
• They must not work in an industry that’s exempt from overtime law (see below).

Manual laborers automatically qualify for overtime pay rates. These include workers like builders, tradespeople, cashiers, factory workers and more. First-responders (firefighters, paramedics, police officers), nurses and paralegals also qualify for overtime.

There are professions that are automatically excluded from overtime pay under the FLSA if they earn more than a weekly salary of $455:

Executives (who manage more than two people full-time);

Administrative workers;

Non-manual professional workers (artists, teachers, programmers);

External salespeople;

Independent contractors;

Most railroad workers;

Most truck drivers;

Certain transportation and agricultural workers;

Certain live-in employees.

If it’s unclear if your workers qualify for overtime, you can consult the FLSA for more information.

Track Overtime with actiTIME!

Florida overtime laws may seem complicated at first, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll be able to keep track of all your employees’ earnings.

Still, if you’re looking to soften the learning curve, actiTIME can provide you with a set of tools to make the process as simple as possible. Read this post to find out how!