A Detailed Breakdown of Calculating Weekly Overtime in Semi-Monthly Pay Periods

If your company operates on a Semi-Monthly pay period, your weekly pay periods will not always align with the work week. uAttend automatically adjusts timecard totals to account for any necessary calculations, such as weekly overtime. Below, we will walk you through the process so you can understand how deductions and overtime calculations work, allowing you to explain them to employees confidently.

Handling Partial Workweeks

When calculating weekly overtime, each full workweek must be looked at individually - regardless of whether the work week falls into one pay period or is split between two.

A workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours or seven consecutive 24-hour periods. A company can define its own workweek (Sunday to Saturday, Monday to Sunday, etc.) as long as it is set in advance and not altered. In uAttend, an account administrator sets the workweek by selecting the day the workweek starts in the Settings tab. 

Workweeks and Semi-Monthly Pay Periods

Semi-monthly pay periods don't always align with the standard 7-day workweek, which can lead to situations where an employee's weekly overtime spans across two pay periods. 

Let's look at a semi-monthly pay period, where the pay period begins on the 1st and the 16th of each month. In the image below, the first pay period (the 1st through the 15th) is highlighted in blue and the second pay period (the 16th through the end of the month) is in orange.  

If the workweek begins on Sunday, this month can be separated into five distinct workweeks:

• Workweek 1: Sept. 29th - Oct. 5th 
• Workweek 2: Oct. 6th - Oct. 12th
• Workweek 3: Oct. 13th - Oct. 19th
• Workweek 4: Oct. 20th - Oct. 26th
• Workweek 5: Oct. 27th - Nov. 2nd

Workweek 1 (29th - 5th), 3 (13th - 19th), and 5 (27th - 2nd) fall across two separate pay periods. This means hours worked in the beginning of the week are in a separate pay period than those in the end of the week and still need to be considered when calculating weekly overtime for that week.

Let's take a look at how this will effect the calculated hours in uAttend. 

uAttend and Weekly Overtime Calculations

uAttend calculates weekly overtime on the last day of the workweek by:

1. Deducting any daily overtime or other deductions.
2. Adding up all other hours worked in the workweek.
3. Comparing the total to your set Weekly Overtime threshold.

To learn more about weekly overtime, see our Weekly/Bi-weekly Overtime article.

For simplicity, we will look at the first pay period (1st - 15th). If weekly overtime is set to 40 hours and an employee typically works 8 hours a day Monday through Friday, but worked an extra day on the 29th, their timecard would appear as follows:

For week 1, they worked six 8 hour days, resulting in 40 hours of regular time and 8 hours of overtime. 

For week 2, they worked five 8 hour days, resulting in 40 hours of regular time. 

For week 3, they worked five 8 hour days, resulting in 40 hours of regular time. 

If we look at strictly the hours worked during the pay period, the timecard would show the following:

For week 1, four 8 hour days are in the pay period, resulting in 32 hours of regular time.

For week 2, five 8 hour days are in the pay period, resulting in 40 hours of regular time. 

For week 3, two 8 hour days are in the pay period, resulting in 16 hours of regular time. 

This would result in a total of 88 hours regular hours worked for the pay period.

But what happened to the overtime?

The 8 Hours of weekly overtime earned the first week still need to be accounted for. 16 Regular Hours from the 29th and 30th were included in the previous pay period.

If we do not deduct the overtime hours, the employee would be getting paid for:

• 16 regular hours from the previous week
• 32 regular hours from the first week on this pay period.
• 40 regular hours from the second week on this pay period.
• 16 regular hours from the third week on this pay period.
• and 8 hours overtime.

That would result in those 8 hours of overtime being paid at both the regular rate AND the overtime rate. This is incorrect. We need to deduct the 8 hours of overtime from the regular time.

How would that appear on a uAttend timecard?

uAttend deducts any weekly overtime earned on the last day of the workweek - in this case Saturday. It will appear as a Weekly Overtime entry and display the necessary calculations.

The calculations will be reflected in the Total Hours displayed at the bottom of the timecard.

If you have additional considerations, such as daily overtime, punch rounding, lockouts, start and end zones, etc., these calculations can become much more complicated. uAttend completes all these calculations so you don't have to.

Feel free to reach out to one of our trained support agents via chat, phone, or email to assist you if you have any questions or concerns.