Know what you're owed.
Night shift pay calculator
Set your own night window and differential, then see exactly how much of your shift falls inside it and what that's worth.
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.
Night is a defined window, not a feeling
"Night shift" sounds obvious until you try to pin down the exact hours. One hospital's night differential window is 19:00–07:00. Another starts it at 23:00. A warehouse might define nights as 22:00–06:00. None of these is more "correct" than another — the window is whatever your employer or union contract sets, and it's worth confirming yours rather than assuming.
That's why this calculator treats the night window as something you configure, defaulting to 19:00–07:00 as a common starting point but changeable in the advanced section.
Partial overlap, calculated automatically
Most real shifts don't line up perfectly with the night window. A 15:00–23:00 evening shift against a 19:00–07:00 night window only spends 4 of its 8 hours inside that window — so only those 4 hours earn the night differential, not the whole shift. The calculator works out this overlap directly from your start and end time, including cases where the shift, the night window, or both cross midnight.
Example: a 19:00 → 07:00 shift is fully inside a 19:00–07:00 night window, so all paid hours (after any unpaid break) receive the differential. Change either window and only the overlapping portion does.
One estimate worth knowing about: an unpaid break isn't subtracted from wherever in the shift you actually took it. Instead the calculator spreads the break proportionally across every segment of the shift, inside and outside the night window alike. In practice this means the differential doesn't change depending on whether your break happened to fall inside or outside the night window — which keeps the math simple and consistent, but is a modeling choice, not a measurement of exactly when you were on break.
The calculator also pays a shift's scheduled hours, not its clock-measured elapsed hours. On the two nights a year when clocks change for daylight saving time, a scheduled 19:00–07:00 shift is still treated as 12 hours even though only 11 (spring forward) or 13 (fall back) actually elapse. 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.
A note on estimated overtime
The advanced section also lets you estimate overtime on top of a night differential. The premium is calculated from this shift's own effective rate — base pay plus any differentials, averaged over its paid hours — not from anything you were paid in a prior week, which this calculator has no visibility into. It's a useful estimate, not a determination of what you're legally owed.
What night differentials typically look like
Night differentials are commonly paid as a flat per-hour amount (e.g. +$4.00/hr) or as a percentage of base rate (e.g. +12%). Neither format is standardized, and there's no federal requirement to pay a night differential at all — it's a benefit employers offer to fill less popular shifts. If your role also carries a weekend differential, charge pay, or another add-on, see the shift differential calculator for how flat/percent and stacking work in general, or the nurse shift pay calculator for nursing-specific differentials.