Know what you're owed.
12-hour shift pay calculator
See how unpaid breaks change your paid hours on a 12-hour shift, and how a 3x12 week sits relative to a 40-hour overtime threshold.
An end time earlier than the start time is treated as crossing midnight.
Your estimate will appear here
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- Base pay
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- Night differential
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- Weekend differential
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- Custom differential
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- Estimated overtime premium
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- Estimated gross
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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.
12 scheduled hours isn't 12 paid hours
A 12-hour shift almost always includes an unpaid break, and that break comes straight off your paid hours:
19:00 → 07:00 = 12h, break = 30 min → paid_hours = 11.5h
The difference between a 30-minute and a 60-minute unpaid break is half an hour of pay — at a $36/hr base rate, that's $18.00 on a single shift, and roughly $54 across a 3x12 week. Worth double-checking against your actual timekeeping system, since some round breaks up or down.
One more wrinkle: on the two nights a year when clocks change for daylight saving time, a scheduled 19:00–07:00 shift only has 11 clock hours elapse in spring or 13 in fall — but this calculator still pays it as a 12-hour scheduled shift. This calculator estimates DST nights using your scheduled hours rather than elapsed clock time — check your employer's policy, since some payroll systems compute actual elapsed hours instead.
Why 3x12 weeks and overtime interact the way they do
Three 12-hour shifts is a common full-time schedule in healthcare, and it lands at 36 scheduled hours — comfortably under a standard 40-hour weekly overtime threshold, even before subtracting unpaid breaks. That's part of why 3x12 is popular: it compresses full-time hours into fewer, longer shifts without routinely crossing into overtime.
The math changes fast once a 4th shift enters the picture, though, because each additional 12-hour shift is a much bigger jump than an extra hour or two on a standard 8-hour schedule. Four 12s is 48 scheduled hours — 8 hours over a 40-hour threshold — all likely landing in a single shift's worth of estimated overtime premium rather than being spread across the week.
That effective regular rate comes entirely from this shift's own base pay and differentials — not from anything you were paid in a prior week, which the calculator has no visibility into. It's an estimate of this shift in isolation.
Combining with night or weekend pay
A 12-hour shift often runs 19:00–07:00 or similar, which puts most or all of it inside a typical night window and can overlap a weekend if it starts on a Friday or Saturday evening. If only part of your shift falls inside a differential window, the calculator spreads your unpaid break proportionally across the whole shift rather than assuming exactly when you took it. For how that overlap and any differential stacking is calculated, see the night shift pay calculator and the shift differential calculator . Nurses on a 3x12 rotation may also want the nurse shift pay calculator for charge and specialty pay.