Daily overtime rules by state, and hotel schedules

Federal law has no daily overtime rule. Under the FLSA, overtime is owed on hours past 40 in a workweek — so a 13-hour Tuesday costs no more than two 6-and-a-half-hour days, as long as the week stays under 40. A short list of US jurisdictions adds a rule on top of that, and in those places the shape of a schedule is a payroll number, not just a staffing preference.

The list that reaches an ordinary hotel is short: California, Alaska, Nevada, Colorado and Puerto Rico. Oregon has a daily rule that does not apply to hotels, and New York has something people mistake for one. Those are below, along with the exceptions that decide whether each rule actually bites — which is where most of the money is. It is not an exhaustive survey of every state’s premium-pay rules, so check your own.

Daily overtime rules by state, as of September 2026

Jurisdiction	The daily rule	What catches hotels
Federal (FLSA)	None. 1.5× past 40 hours in a workweek	A long day, by itself, costs nothing extra
California	1.5× past 8 hours in a workday; 2× past 12. On the 7th consecutive day of a workweek, 1.5× for the first 8 hours and 2× beyond	Hotels and motels sit in Wage Order 5, Public Housekeeping. A four-day, ten-hour schedule triggers daily overtime unless a valid alternative workweek is adopted
Alaska	1.5× past 8 hours in a day, and past 40 in a week	Employers with fewer than four employees in the regular course of business are exempt — very few hotels qualify. A four-ten avoids the daily rule only under a voluntary flexible work hour plan: it cannot be a condition of employment, and it has to be filed with and certified by the state before use
Nevada	1.5× past 8 hours in a 24-hour workday — but only for employees earning less than 1.5× the state minimum wage	A wage cliff, not a gradient: at a $12.00 minimum wage the line sits at $18.00/hour. A mutually agreed four-day, ten-hour schedule is separately exempt from the daily rule
Colorado	1.5× past 12 hours in a workday, or past 12 consecutive hours, or past 40 in a week — whichever pays more	The 12-consecutive-hours test ignores where your workday boundary is
Puerto Rico	1.5× past 8 hours in a calendar day for employees hired on or after 26 January 2017; employees hired before that date keep the earlier 2× rate	The rate turns on hire date, so two housekeepers on the same shift can be owed different premiums. A written alternative weekly schedule can permit shifts up to 10 hours inside a 40-hour week

Three of those are structurally odd and worth pulling out, because the oddity is usually what decides the bill.

Nevada’s rule is keyed to the employee’s own rate, so two people working the identical schedule can be owed different money, and a raise across the threshold removes the entitlement outright. Colorado’s is keyed to a stretch of hours rather than to a day, so it does not care where your workday boundary sits. Puerto Rico’s is keyed to when the person was hired: a 2017 reform cut the daily overtime rate from double time to time-and-a-half, but only going forward, so anyone hired before 26 January 2017 kept the older, more expensive rate. At a hotel — where a night auditor or a room attendant with a decade of tenure is entirely ordinary — that split is a live payroll question, not a historical footnote.

The same 40 hours, four different bills

Take an invented case — a 60-room limited-service property, one front desk supervisor at $20.00/hour, scheduled four ten-hour days. Forty hours. No weekly overtime anywhere.

Where the property is	What the week costs
A weekly-only state (Texas, Florida, most of the country)	40 × $20.00 = $800
California, no alternative workweek adopted	32 × $20.00 + 8 × $30.00 = $880
Alaska, no approved flexible work hour plan	32 × $20.00 + 8 × $30.00 = $880
Colorado	No day passes 12 hours, no 12-hour consecutive stretch = $800
Nevada, at $20.00/hour	Above the $18.00 line, and a mutually agreed four-ten is exempt anyway = $800

Same person, same forty hours, same work. In California that schedule carries eight overtime hours a week — about $4,200 a year more than the identical forty hours would cost in a weekly-only state — and split into five eight-hour days it carries none.

That is the whole practical point of daily overtime rules: they price the schedule’s shape. A compressed week is a genuine retention lever in housekeeping and at the front desk, and in a daily-overtime state it is one you either pay for or structure around. The coverage arithmetic underneath it — how many people you actually need on the floor before you start shaping their days — is a separate question, and one we worked through for a 40-room motel.

If you want to see the shape of your own week before it turns into a payroll number, start a free trial.

Each of these states offers a structured route to the four-ten, and they differ sharply in how much work they are. Nevada’s is the lightest: a mutually agreed schedule of ten hours a day, four days a week. Puerto Rico’s needs a written agreement. Alaska’s is a voluntary flexible work hour plan that has to be filed with the state and certified before it takes effect — a form and a waiting period, but an individual one. California’s is the heaviest — up to ten hours a day inside a 40-hour week, adopted by secret-ballot election with at least two-thirds of a readily identifiable work unit approving. That is a real procedure, not a box to tick, and a defective election is worse than never having held one.

The three that get mis-stated

Most “states with daily overtime” lists you will find are wrong in the same three places.

Oregon is usually listed without its qualifier. Oregon’s daily overtime statute covers work in mills, factories and manufacturing establishments past ten hours in a day. A hotel is not a manufacturing establishment. Listing Oregon flat is the most common error in these roundups.

New York does not have daily overtime — it has spread of hours. For any day where the spread between an employee’s first and last punch exceeds ten hours, one extra hour of pay at the basic minimum wage rate is owed. “Spread” includes unpaid meal breaks and the gap between two shifts, so a front desk split — 7am to 11am, back at 4pm to 9pm — is a 14-hour spread on nine paid hours. Under New York’s Hospitality Wage Order this is owed regardless of what the employee earns, and it is not overtime: it is not part of the regular rate and cannot be credited against overtime you already owe.

“We’re in a weekly state, so the day doesn’t matter” is the third, and it is half true. The day still decides which pay period the hours land in, and every per-day operating number you look at. It just does not, on its own, cost you a premium.

Where this actually breaks at a hotel

Four seams, in rough order of how often they cause trouble.

Which day the punch belongs to. A daily threshold is only as good as the definition of “day” underneath it — and if your time system groups punches by UTC rather than by the property’s local date, an evening shift is split across two dates and the daily overtime it earned is never computed at all. We wrote that one up separately: overtime on the wrong day.

The overnight cover. Someone works 3pm to 11pm, then covers the night audit through 7am. In Colorado that is sixteen consecutive hours and four hours of overtime, even though a workday boundary falls in the middle of it — the consecutive-hours test exists so the boundary cannot be used to dodge the premium.

The seventh consecutive day. In California, someone who works all seven days of the workweek is owed 1.5× for the first eight hours of that seventh day and 2× beyond. It shows up in peak season and around call-outs, which is exactly when nobody is checking.

The split shift. Common at a small front desk, and the source of both New York’s spread-of-hours liability and California’s separate split-shift premium. A schedule that looks efficient on a coverage grid can be the most expensive one on the page.

The honest limits

These rules change, and some move on their own. Nevada’s threshold tracks the minimum wage, so it shifts when the wage does. Colorado reissues its wage order. Cities can layer requirements on top of state law, and collective bargaining agreements can displace some state daily overtime rules entirely. Every rule above applies only to non-exempt employees, and whether a given supervisor is exempt is a separate question people get wrong more often than the overtime math.

This is not legal advice, and this table is not a substitute for your state’s actual rule. Look up the rule for each state you operate in, confirm it against the state’s own labor agency, and get an employment lawyer involved before you restructure a schedule around any of it.

What software can do here is narrower than vendors usually imply. A time system should record every punch against the property’s own local date, so a late shift stays on the day it was worked, and it should show daily totals rather than only weekly ones — a weekly total cannot surface a rule that operates on days. It cannot tell you which rule your state applies. That decision gets made before the schedule is built, by a human who looked it up.