Iowa Overtime Pay Calculator

Iowa has no state overtime law of its own, so nearly every private-sector worker's overtime rights come straight from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. That means the 40-hour workweek rule controls: non-exempt employees must be paid 1.5 times their regular rate for every hour worked past 40 in a single workweek. There is no daily overtime in Iowa no matter how long a single shift runs, so an employee who works four 12-hour days and has three days off is owed 8 hours of overtime that week, not overtime for exceeding 8 hours in a day.

Iowa's own minimum wage statute, Iowa Code §91D.1, sets the state floor at $7.25/hr, identical to the federal minimum, so the overtime rate math is simply the federal rate multiplied by 1.5 for most hourly workers. Salaried non-exempt employees are also covered — their salary is converted to an hourly regular rate by dividing weekly pay by hours actually worked, then that rate is used for the overtime premium on hours beyond 40.

Agricultural workers are a major exception. Under both federal and Iowa practice, most agricultural employees are exempt from overtime entirely, reflecting FLSA §213(b)(12) exemptions that Iowa follows rather than overrides. This matters enormously in a state with Iowa's farming footprint, where seasonal and livestock workers often work well past 40 hours with no overtime premium owed at all.

Because Iowa defers to federal law for overtime, unpaid overtime claims are typically filed with the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, which has a district office serving Iowa, or pursued as a private FLSA lawsuit in federal court. The Iowa Division of Labor Services (part of Iowa Workforce Development) handles wage payment complaints, like final paychecks and deductions, under Iowa Code chapter 91A, but overtime-specific claims usually route to the federal agency or a private attorney.

The FLSA statute of limitations gives workers two years to recover back overtime, extended to three years if the employer's violation was willful — for example, if a manager knowingly misclassified hourly workers as exempt to avoid paying overtime. Workers should keep their own time records because Iowa does not require employers to give employees copies of time cards, and disputes often come down to whose records a court trusts.

The most common Iowa overtime trap is misclassification: calling a worker a manager or an independent contractor to sidestep overtime, even though their actual day-to-day duties are hourly-style tasks like stocking, driving, or data entry. The FLSA's executive, administrative, and professional exemptions require a specific salary level (currently $684/week federally, with ongoing rule changes to watch) plus a duties test — a title alone never makes someone exempt.

Because Iowa has not enacted its own overtime statute, workers here get exactly the federal floor, no more. States like California or Colorado add daily overtime or stricter meal-break rules; Iowa does not, so a grueling 13-hour single shift with only 35 weekly hours yields no overtime pay under either state or federal law. Tipped workers face their own math: employers may pay a $4.35 minimum cash wage of Iowa's $7.25 floor as long as tips make up the difference, but overtime must be calculated on the full $7.25 minimum, not the reduced tipped rate — a calculation many small employers get wrong.