Four ten-hour days, no federal overtime by design. Model the state daily-overtime rules that apply anyway in California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado.
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Standard FLSA: overtime applies after 40h in any Sun–Sat workweek within this period.
Gross Pay — This Period
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Four ten-hour days, three days off. Forty scheduled hours, or thirty-eight paid once a thirty-minute unpaid meal break is deducted from each shift. Under federal law that is the cleanest possible result: forty hours is exactly the Fair Labor Standards Act threshold, nothing sits above it, and a compressed 4x10 week generates no federal overtime whatsoever.
That is the whole federal story, and it is why 4x10 is popular with employers — a three-day weekend at no premium cost. The complication is entirely at state level, and for a significant share of workers it is the difference between a flat cheque and eight hours of overtime a week.
A minority of jurisdictions impose overtime based on hours worked in a single day, independent of the weekly total. California is the most consequential: hours beyond eight in a workday are paid at one and a half times the regular rate, and hours beyond twelve at double time, with additional rules for a seventh consecutive day of work in a workweek. Alaska applies a daily eight-hour rule. Nevada applies one for employees below a wage threshold tied to the state minimum wage. Colorado uses a twelve-hour daily trigger, which a ten-hour shift does not reach. Puerto Rico applies daily overtime as well.
In a plain daily-overtime state, a 4x10 roster produces up to two overtime hours per shift — eight a week, roughly four hundred and sixteen a year — from a schedule that federal law treats as entirely ordinary. With a thirty-minute unpaid meal the figure is 1.5 hours a shift, six a week, about 312 a year. On a $32 base wage that is roughly $5,000 to $6,700 a year in premium that does not exist for the same schedule worked two states away.
California does permit a 4x10 without daily overtime, but only through a specific and often-skipped procedure. The employer must propose an alternative workweek schedule to a defined work unit, hold a secret ballot, obtain approval from at least two thirds of the affected employees in the work unit, and report the result to the state. The adopted schedule must specify the number of days and hours, and hours worked beyond the adopted schedule revert to overtime.
Where no valid election exists — or where the employer moved people onto 4x10 by memo rather than by ballot, or changed the shift length after the vote — the daily overtime obligation was never displaced. This is one of the more common wage-and-hour findings in compressed-schedule workplaces, and it is worth knowing whether your work unit ever actually voted.
To model the daily-overtime case in this calculator, treat the two hours above eight on each shift as premium hours rather than relying on the weekly threshold, which by design will return zero for this roster.
The unpaid break creates a quiet gap specific to 4x10. Four ten-hour shifts with thirty minutes deducted each is thirty-eight paid hours, not forty. That leaves two hours of headroom below the federal threshold.
If you are called in, held over, or attend a mandatory training session, the first two hours of that extra time are paid at straight time under the federal rule, because they only bring you back up to forty. Workers expecting time-and-a-half on any called-in hour are often surprised. Code the callback day on the calendar and compare the totals — the gap is visible immediately in the overtime hours metric.
California adds a second daily rule that compressed schedules run into more often than people expect. Working a seventh consecutive day in a single workweek triggers time and a half for the first eight hours and double time beyond that, independent of the daily and weekly thresholds. A 4x10 roster leaves three days off, so it does not reach a seventh day on its own — but working all three of your days off in a single workweek will, and the premium on that seventh day is far larger than the hours alone suggest. Code picked-up days as Forced OT on the calendar so they are separated from your scheduled four.
The same logic applies to the 9/80 variant, where eight nine-hour days and one eight-hour day are worked across two weeks with alternating Fridays off. A 9/80 only avoids weekly overtime if the workweek boundary is set to split the eight-hour Friday in half, which is precisely why employers running 9/80 set an unusual workweek start time. If your stub shows a workweek starting mid-shift on a Friday, that is not an error either.
