Minnesota Overtime Laws

The Truth About Minnesota Overtime Laws

There are some misconceptions involving Minnesota overtime laws – overtime laws all over the country, actually – that you do need to keep in mind.

You may not even realize it: but you might’ve worked one week at your job and had been entitled to actual overtime by Minnesota overtime law! How?

An Understanding of How Minnesota Overtime Laws Work

Everyone knows that overtime is basically 1 ½ times the regular rate of pay, whatever the pay may be. It just so happens, though, that Minnesota overtime laws actually require that all forms of payment in a job fall under those rules.

How? After all, there’s….

1. Hourly Rate

2. Piecework

3. Salary

Three different forms of payment a job can offer. The standard understanding of how overtime works based on Minnesota overtime laws is that hourly rates fall under the law. For obvious reasons.

After all, overtime can be easily deduced simply by having the hourly rate, taking that rate times 1 ½ and then multiplying that by the actual overtime amount.

According to Minnesota overtime law, you need to work over 48 hours in the workweek. So let’s say you’ve got 51 hours in one week at $6/hour. Overtime for $6/hour would be 6 times 1 ½, which is $9/hour. Since you had worked 51 hours – 3 hours over your full-time workweek, that’s 9 times 3, which is 27.

$27 is the overtime amount in addition to the regular paycheck.

The Minnesota overtime law even provides a method of figuring overtime when considering piecework:

While the hourly rate is simply $/hour, piecework is $/project. In other words, if you have a job where you set up packages every day, and you get paid for package, that’s piecework under MN overtime laws.

By Minnesota overtime law, overtime can be figured by the employee logging hours every week.

Let’s say you worked 55 hours in that one week, packaging materials at $10 per package. Throughout the whole week, you packaged 50 packages.

Do the math, and you’ll find that it would be a check of $500 in that week. If you were curious about MN overtime laws, you could easily figure out what the actual ‘hourly rate’ would be by dividing 500 by the number of hours you worked – in this case, 55.

It would roughly be about $9/hour based on MN overtime laws.

So now you can do the math and find out what the overtime may be. The Minnesota overtime law would apply half of that hourly rate and apply it to the actual overtime, in this case being seven hours.

Multiply that 7 with $4.50, and you’ll get $31.50. That’s your overtime based on MN overtime laws for that week in addition to the check you already have.

Simply count your working hours in any particular week, figure the hourly rate, and do the math to find out what the overtime is.

It’s mandatory by MN overtime laws. All employees should take advantage of it whenever possible.