Hourly to Paystub Earnings Calculator

How to turn hourly wages into paystub earnings lines

Most gross pay calculators hand you a single number. A pay stub does not want a single number. It wants rows. The earnings section carries four columns for every line it prints: a description, the hours, the rate, and the amount. Get those rows right and the rest of the stub is bookkeeping.

Three things fill that section. Regular is the base rate times the straight-time hours. Overtime is the overtime hours at a multiplied rate. Other earnings is anything not measured in hours: a bonus, commission, a shift differential, holiday pay, vacation pay.

Work the standard example. $22 an hour, 40 regular hours, 5 overtime hours, a $150 bonus:

• Regular: $22.00 x 40 hours = $880.00
• Overtime (1.5x): $22.00 x 1.5 = $33.00/hr, x 5 hours = $165.00
• Bonus: $150.00
• Gross earnings: $880.00 + $165.00 + $150.00 = $1,195.00

That $1,195.00 is gross pay: everything earned, before a single deduction comes out. On the finished stub, each of those rows also carries a year-to-date column next to the current-period amount, so a reader sees this check and the running annual total at once. Once you have one period's gross, the YTD earnings calculator rolls it into that annual column.

Overtime rules that change the number

The FLSA requires nonexempt employees to be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek (DOL Fact Sheet #23). That is the whole federal rule. There is no federal overtime requirement for weekends, for holidays, or for hours over 8 in a single day, and there is no federal double-time requirement at all. Where 2x shows up, it comes from state law (California, over 12 hours in a workday) or from a union contract or a company policy.

The part that trips up biweekly filers is the unit. Overtime is figured per workweek, which the FLSA defines as a fixed, recurring 168-hour period. It is not figured per pay period, and the Act does not permit averaging hours across two or more weeks. Say you work 30 hours in week one and 50 hours in week two. The biweekly total is 80 hours, which looks like no overtime at all. It is not. Week two ran 10 hours over 40, so 10 overtime hours are owed, and they print on the biweekly stub as their own line.

So split the pay period into its workweeks first, count the hours over 40 in each one, add those overtime hours together, and enter the sum above. That is why this calculator asks for regular hours and overtime hours separately instead of deriving overtime from a single hours figure. Only you know where your workweek boundary sits.

When a bonus changes the overtime rate

Here is the rule most free calculators skip. A nondiscretionary bonus has to be included in the regular rate, which means extra overtime premium is owed on it (DOL Fact Sheet #56C, 29 CFR 778.209). Nondiscretionary means promised in advance: production bonuses, attendance bonuses, safety bonuses, incentive bonuses tied to hitting a target, and most commission arrangements. If the worker knew the bonus was on offer and knew roughly what triggered it, it is nondiscretionary.

A discretionary bonus is the genuine surprise. The employer keeps sole say over whether to pay and how much, right up to the end of the period. A holiday gift with no strings is the textbook case, and those stay out of the regular rate.

With the toggle on, the math spreads the bonus across the hours worked and pays a half-time premium on the overtime portion of it:

• Bonus per hour = bonus divided by total hours worked
• Bonus overtime premium = bonus per hour x 0.5 x overtime hours

Back to the running example: a $150 nondiscretionary bonus over 45 total hours is $3.33 an hour. Half of that is $1.67, and across the 5 overtime hours that is another $8.33 owed. Gross goes from $1,195.00 to $1,203.33. Small money, and skipping it is still a wage violation.

One rounding note, which matters more than it sounds like it should. The overtime rate is never rounded before it gets multiplied by hours. A $21.995 overtime rate across 5 hours is $109.975, which displays as $109.98, not the $110.00 you would get from rounding the rate to $22.00 first. Every figure here is summed unrounded and rounded only at display, which is why the line-item rows always add up to the total printed beneath them.

From earnings lines to a finished paystub

Correct earnings rows are the hard half. The rest of the stub is assembly: the employer and employee parties, the pay period and pay date, the deductions that turn gross into net, any employer contributions, and the year-to-date column next to every line.

Payslip44 builds that document. Employer, employee, and line-item templates are reusable, so the next stub is a few taps instead of a re-entry. It handles W-2, 1099, statutory, and owner classifications, has six layouts, and does its money math to the cent so a year of stubs does not drift. Everything runs on-device, and finished stubs export to PDF, PNG, CSV, or plain text. There is more reading on the blog, and the other calculators are on the tools page.