Know what you're owed.
What is this shift actually worth?
Enter your rate and shift times to get an estimated gross pay breakdown, including night, weekend and custom differentials — free, no account needed.
An end time earlier than the start time is treated as crossing midnight.
Your estimate will appear here
—
- Base pay
- —
- Night differential
- —
- Weekend differential
- —
- Custom differential
- —
- Estimated overtime premium
- —
- Estimated gross
- —
Paid hours: —
Effective hourly rate: —
How this estimate works
- Unpaid break time is spread proportionally across the shift, not subtracted from one specific pay window.
- On a daylight-saving change day, pay follows your scheduled shift length, not the shifted clock time.
- Estimated overtime premium is based on this shift's own average pay rate, not your actual prior-week earnings.
A scheduled hourly rate is rarely the whole story
Two people on the same $32/hour base rate can walk away from very different paychecks depending on when they worked, how long the shift ran, and what got deducted for an unpaid break. A day shift with no differentials pays exactly base rate times hours worked. An overnight shift with a night differential, a Saturday overlap, and a few hours over 40 for the week can pay noticeably more per hour — even though the "hourly rate" printed on the offer letter never changed.
This calculator exists to answer one question before payday: given exactly what you were scheduled and paid, what should this shift come out to? It's meant to be a sanity check, not a replacement for your pay stub.
What goes into the estimate
Differentials, in short
A shift differential is extra pay for working a less desirable time slot — nights, weekends, holidays, or a specific role like charge nurse. Employers pay it as either a flat dollar amount per hour or a percentage of your base rate, and when more than one differential applies to the same hours, some employers add them together and others only pay the highest one. Neither approach is universal, so the calculator lets you choose.
One estimate to know about: when a differential only covers part of a shift, an unpaid break is spread proportionally across the whole shift rather than removed from wherever you actually took it — see the shift differential calculator for a worked example of how that plays out.
Another estimate to know about: a shift that spans a daylight saving time change is paid for its scheduled hours, not the shorter or longer clock time that actually elapses — see the night shift pay calculator for how that works.
For a deeper look at how flat and percentage differentials work, and how stacking rules change the result, see the shift differential calculator . If you work nights specifically, the night shift pay calculator covers how night windows are usually defined.
A note on overtime
Overtime pay in the US is often described as "time and a half after 40 hours," but the actual multiplier applies to your regular rate, which can include differentials and other compensation — not just your base rate. This calculator asks for a threshold, a multiplier, and the hours you've already worked that week, then applies the premium to hours past the threshold at your effective regular rate. That effective rate is calculated from this shift's own base pay and differentials — the calculator has no visibility into anything you earned in a prior week. It's a useful estimate, not a determination of what you're legally owed.