Alabama Overtime Pay Calculator

Alabama has never adopted its own wage-and-hour statute governing overtime, so every non-exempt worker in the state depends entirely on the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The rule is straightforward: covered employees earn 1.5 times their regular rate for every hour worked beyond 40 in a single workweek. There is no daily overtime trigger, no double time, and no premium simply for working nights, weekends, or holidays, no matter how physically demanding the schedule is.

Because Alabama has no state minimum wage, the applicable floor is the federal $7.25/hour, unchanged for well over a decade. That makes the minimum legal overtime rate $10.88/hour. Many Alabama workers, especially in manufacturing, poultry processing, and logistics hubs around Huntsville and Mobile, actually earn well above minimum wage, but the overtime math still starts from whatever regular hourly rate they're actually paid, including shift differentials and non-discretionary bonuses folded into that rate.

Alabama's legislature passed a temporary state income tax exemption on overtime pay that ran through mid-2025; check current Alabama Department of Revenue guidance for whether any successor provision still applies, since it affects take-home pay rather than the overtime rate itself.

Misclassification is the most common issue reported by Alabama workers, particularly in the state's large automotive supply chain and poultry industry. Employers sometimes label line leads or shift supervisors as 'exempt managers' when those workers actually spend most of their time on the same physical tasks as the people they supervise. Under FLSA, job title alone never determines exempt status; the actual duties performed and a minimum salary of $684/week (subject to pending federal rule changes) both matter.

Agricultural work is a genuine carve-out here: FLSA exempts most agricultural employees from overtime entirely, which affects a meaningful share of Alabama's rural workforce. Domestic workers and certain seasonal amusement or recreational employees face similar exemptions. Tipped workers in Alabama's restaurant and hospitality sector are entitled to overtime calculated on the full minimum wage, not the reduced $2.13 tipped cash wage, a distinction employers frequently get wrong when doing payroll math by hand.

Alabama has no state labor agency that handles private wage claims, so workers file directly with the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division office serving the Southeast, or bring a private lawsuit in federal court under FLSA §216(b). A successful claim typically recovers the unpaid overtime plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, effectively doubling the award, along with attorney's fees and costs.

The clock is strict: claims must generally be filed within 2 years of the underlying paycheck, extended to 3 years if the employer's violation can be shown to be willful. Because Alabama offers no extended state-law lookback period the way some states do, workers who wait too long permanently lose access to older unpaid weeks, so it pays to gather pay stubs and timecards as soon as a problem is suspected.