Overtime Cost Projection Tool

How It Works

1. Enter OT Pay Inputs

   Input average base hourly rate, overtime multiplier, weekly OT hours per employee, employees on overtime, and weeks per year. These rows drive the modeled overtime wage and premium math.

2. Enter Burden Rows

   Enter the workers compensation rate per $100 of payroll and the burdened new-hire hourly rate from current payroll, insurance, HR, or accounting records. Do not rely on generic trade percentages.

3. Add Turnover And Incident Assumptions

   Enter annual turnover rate, replacement cost, baseline incident rate, incident-rate increase, and average incident cost only if you have a documented local basis. Otherwise treat the rows as source gaps.

4. Review The Cost Waterfall

   The app separates overtime wages, FICA shortcut, workers compensation row, turnover assumption, and incident assumption so reviewers can challenge each row independently.

5. Review Hiring Arithmetic

   Compare OT-hour coverage FTE, rounded replacement hires, rounded replacement-hiring cost, and budget-equivalent FTE. The comparison is arithmetic only, not a hiring approval.

6. Export With Source Warnings

   Export the PDF or CSV for management review with the same warnings about payroll, FLSA, workers compensation, fatigue, safety, HR, budget, and legal gaps.

Built For

• Operations teams screening chronic overtime assumptions before a staffing or budget review
• HR teams comparing replacement-cost assumptions with current recruiting and onboarding records
• Safety teams documenting when extended-hours plans need fatigue and incident-history review
• Finance teams separating overtime wage cost from payroll-tax, insurance, turnover, and incident assumption rows
• Estimators checking whether extended schedules need payroll, burden, and source-gap review before a bid or change order
• Labor-relations teams documenting which overtime assumptions depend on CBA, policy, or state wage-hour rules

Features & Capabilities

Visible Overtime Wage Math

Shows total OT hours, overtime wages, and direct overtime premium from the entered base rate, multiplier, employees, hours, and weeks.

FICA Planning Shortcut

Applies a visible 7.65% employer FICA shortcut while warning that employee-level wage-base, fringe, deposit, FUTA, SUTA, and payroll-provider rules are outside the calculator.

Workers Comp Source Boundary

Uses the entered workers compensation rate per $100 payroll and warns that class codes, state bureau rates, insurer quotes, payroll audits, and EMR data control real premiums.

Turnover And Incident Rows

Keeps turnover and incident-cost assumptions separate so HR and safety reviewers can replace them with local records or remove them from the model.

Two FTE Concepts

Separates OT-hour coverage FTE from budget-equivalent FTE so the model does not confuse hours coverage with what the overtime budget could fund.

Source Warnings In Exports

PDF and CSV exports carry warnings, assumptions, residual gaps, and source pointers for payroll, FLSA, BLS, NCCI, OSHA, NIOSH, and fatigue context.

Assumptions

• Total overtime wages = employees x OT hours per week x base hourly rate x overtime multiplier x weeks per year.
• FICA shortcut = total overtime wages x 7.65%; employee-level wage-base and tax treatment are not modeled.
• Workers compensation row = total overtime wages x entered rate per $100 payroll / 100.
• Turnover row = turnover rate x employees x replacement cost x 25% local overtime-attribution factor.
• Incident row = employees / 100 x baseline incidents x incident-rate increase x average incident cost.
• Replacement-hiring row uses overtime hours / 2,080 to estimate FTE coverage, then rounds up to whole hires.

Limitations

• Does not calculate FLSA regular rate, exemptions, compensable time, state daily overtime, prevailing wage, CBA terms, or payroll compliance.
• Does not model employee-level Social Security wage-base caps, FUTA, SUTA, deposits, forms, taxable fringe benefits, or payroll-provider setup.
• Does not determine workers compensation class code, EMR, state bureau rate, insurer quote, or payroll audit treatment.
• Does not validate turnover, replacement-cost, incident-rate, productivity, quality, absenteeism, or fatigue assumptions against local records.
• Does not approve hiring, layoffs, temporary labor, staffing coverage, safety-sensitive work, or budget requests.

References

1. IRS Publication 15 (Circular E) and SSA 2026 wage-base source pointers for federal payroll-tax context.
2. DOL WHD Fact Sheets #22 and #56A for hours-worked and regular-rate source boundaries.
3. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for compensation-category context.
4. NCCI Basic Manual and Experience Rating source pointers for workers compensation classification and EMR boundaries.
5. OSHA worker-fatigue pages, NIOSH Publication 2004-143, and Folkard-Lombardi source pointer for extended-hours and fatigue context.

Frequently Asked Questions