Overtime Cost Calculator
See what chronic overtime really costs across the year, including the premium you pay above straight time for the same hours of work. Your numbers stay in your browser.
Annual overtime cost
$0
How this is calculated
Straight multiplication of your inputs, nothing hidden.
Straight-time equivalent = annual OT hours × base rate
The premium is the number to watch. It is the money you pay above what those same hours would cost at straight time; it buys you no extra output per hour, only the same hour at a higher price.
Caveats and what the number is telling you
- This uses base pay only. Payroll taxes and benefits that scale with wages make the true cost higher. If you have a loaded rate, use it.
- OT is rarely uniform. A few crews and a few bottleneck machines usually carry most of it. Averages hide that; check the distribution.
- Some overtime is healthy. Flexing up for a genuine demand spike is exactly what OT is for. The expensive kind is the standing, every-week variety.
- Chronic OT is a symptom. Standing overtime usually signals a capacity or scheduling gap: hidden downtime, unbalanced lines, rework loops, or plans built on stale data. Fatigue then feeds quality and safety problems, which feed more overtime.
Before adding headcount or a shift, it is worth asking how much of the overtime is covering recoverable losses. The fundamentals of finding and removing that waste are in our lean manufacturing guide, and what a manufacturing operating system is explains the visibility layer that makes scheduling gaps show up before they become weekend shifts.
Find the capacity you are paying overtime to replace
Harmony connects your machines, systems, and paperwork into one real-time operational layer, no rip-and-replace, so schedule gaps and hidden losses surface while there is still time to fix them on straight time. Read the CLS case study.
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