Nurse shift pay calculator

A single nursing shift can stack several kinds of extra pay: a night differential for working overnight, a weekend differential for a Saturday or Sunday, and a role-based differential for charge duty, precepting a new hire, or a specialty certification. Whether those add together or only the highest one counts depends entirely on your employer's policy — this calculator lets you set that explicitly instead of guessing.

These role-based differentials are usually a flat per-hour amount — commonly somewhere in the $1–$5/hr range depending on facility and region, though this varies enormously and isn't standardized. Enter it using the custom differential field: flat dollar or percentage. Note that the custom differential applies to the whole shift in this calculator, not just the hours you were actually acting in that role — there's no field for a partial-shift window.

If you only took charge for part of a shift, entering the full per-hour amount will overstate the extra pay: an 8-hour shift with 4 charge hours at +$4/hr is really +$16 (4 hours × $4.00), not the +$32 the calculator would show if you entered +$4/hr for the full shift. For a quick estimate in that case, either work out the partial-charge amount by hand and add it to a charge-free run of the calculator, or enter a blended rate averaged over the whole shift instead — here, $4 × 4 ÷ 8 = $2/hr — so the custom differential line reflects the same total extra pay.

Many nursing schedules rotate through day, night, and weekend shifts within the same pay period, sometimes with different differentials applying to each. Because this calculator works one shift at a time, the way to estimate a full pay period is to run each distinct shift through it separately — a night weekday shift, a weekend night shift, and so on — since the differential and overtime math can differ shift to shift. For the mechanics of night-window overlap specifically, see the night shift pay calculator . If your shift only partly overlaps a night or weekend window, note that any unpaid break is spread proportionally across the whole shift rather than removed from one specific window — the shift differential calculator walks through a worked example. Also worth knowing: a shift that spans a daylight saving time change is paid for its scheduled hours rather than the clock time that actually elapses — see the night shift pay calculator for that policy in detail.

Three 12-hour shifts a week totals 36 scheduled hours — below a standard 40-hour overtime threshold. But pick up an extra shift, get held over, or work under a different threshold and the math changes quickly because each additional hour is a larger fraction of an already-long shift. The 12-hour shift pay calculator walks through this interaction in more detail. The overtime premium is estimated from this shift's own base pay and differentials, not from any prior week's earnings, which the calculator can't see. As with the rest of this site, the overtime figure here is an estimate, not a legally binding calculation.