12 Hour Shift Pay Calculator

How 12-hour shift pay actually works

Start with paid hours, not scheduled hours. A 12-hour shift with a 30-minute unpaid meal period is 11.5 paid hours, because a bona fide meal period where you are fully relieved of duty is not hours worked under 29 CFR 785.19. Short rest breaks of roughly 5 to 20 minutes are different: those are compensable and stay in the count. That one deduction moves real money. Four shifts a week is 48 scheduled hours but 46 paid hours, which is 6 overtime hours instead of 8.

Next, the rate that multiplier gets applied to. It is your regular rate, which is not always your base rate. 29 CFR 778.207 requires nightshift differentials to sit inside the regular rate, whether they arrive as a percentage of base or as flat cents per hour. At $25 an hour with a $2 night differential, your regular rate is $27 and your overtime rate is $40.50, not $37.50. Skipping that step costs you $3 on every overtime hour. (If only some of your shifts carry the premium, the FLSA requires a weighted-average regular rate, which this page does not attempt.)

Then the overtime line. Federal law draws it at 40 hours in a workweek, and a workweek is a fixed, recurring period of 168 consecutive hours that your employer designates. Not a pay period, not a calendar week, not an average. That definition is where most 12-hour rotation confusion begins.

Overtime on rotating schedules: each workweek stands alone

Search for any 12-hour rotation and you will be told it averages 42 hours a week. True, and useless for payroll. 42 minus 40 reads like 2 overtime hours a week, and that number is wrong on every rotation in this calculator.

29 CFR 778.104 is explicit: the FLSA "takes a single workweek as its standard and does not permit averaging of hours over 2 or more weeks. Thus, if an employee works 30 hours one week and 50 hours the next, he must receive overtime compensation for the overtime hours worked beyond the applicable maximum in the second week, even though the average number of hours worked in the 2 weeks is 40. This is true regardless of whether the employee works on a standard or swing-shift schedule."

Run a Pitman rotation at $25 an hour with no break deduction and the gap shows up immediately.

$50 per pay period is about $1,300 a year at that rate, and DuPont is worse: averaging pays roughly 8 overtime hours per 28-day cycle where the per-week math owes 48.

One honest caveat. The 36 and 48-hour split assumes your employer's designated workweek falls where the rotation intends it. The same seven shifts, cut on a different day boundary, can produce a 60-hour week and a 24-hour week, which would be 20 overtime hours per 14 days instead of 8. If your stub disagrees with this page, the workweek boundary is the first thing to check, and it is a payroll configuration decision your employer makes.

Hours and overtime by rotation pattern

All figures below assume 12 paid hours per shift with no break deduction. Change the shift length or the unpaid break above and every number moves.

The Pitman rotation runs seven 12-hour shifts per 14 days: three one week, four the next. 84 hours, a 42-hour average, and 8 overtime hours banked entirely in the four-shift week.

DuPont packs 14 shifts into 28 days as 4 nights, 3 off, 3 days, 1 off, 3 nights, 3 off, 4 days, then 7 off. By workweek that is 48, 72, 48, and 0 hours. The 72-hour week alone carries 32 overtime hours, and the zero-hour week is the reason a DuPont crew asks why one check looks so small.

4 on / 4 off is the awkward one, because an 8-day cycle does not divide a 7-day workweek. It only lines up with the calendar every 56 days: 28 shifts across 8 workweeks, which forces exactly four 48-hour weeks and four 36-hour weeks (4a + 3b = 28 with a + b = 8 has one solution). Only the order changes with the boundary, never the totals, so this page reports an 8-week cycle and annualizes at 6.5 cycles rather than pretending to know which week you are in.

Fixed 3 x 12, the standard hospital week, is 36 hours and zero federal overtime. It is also the rotation where a state daily rule matters most, since every shift runs 4 hours past California's 8-hour daily line. For punch-level accuracy on any of these, the timesheet calculator takes real in and out times instead of a pattern.

What lands in your bank account

Gross is the easy half. The take-home figure on this page annualizes your rotation, subtracts the 2026 federal standard deduction for your filing status, runs the result through the federal brackets, then takes 6.2% Social Security up to the annual wage base and 1.45% Medicare on everything. That is a deliberately narrow model: no state or local income tax, no 401(k) or health premiums, no extra W-4 withholding, no credits. State tax alone can be several thousand dollars a year, so treat the number as a ceiling rather than a paycheck.

There is one wrinkle worth knowing on a rotation this overtime-heavy. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21) created a federal deduction for qualified overtime covering tax years 2025 through 2028, capped at $12,500 for single and head-of-household filers and $25,000 for joint filers, with married filing separately excluded. Only the FLSA-required premium qualifies, meaning the extra 0.5x above your regular rate rather than the whole overtime check. On a DuPont rotation at $25 an hour, 624 overtime hours a year carry roughly $7,800 of premium, which sits comfortably under the cap. This calculator does not apply the deduction, so your actual federal tax may come in lower than shown.

If you want the real number instead of an estimate, that is what the app is for. ClockWage44 tracks shifts across multiple jobs, handles per-shift rate overrides for the nights that carry a differential, and resolves federal tax, all 50 states plus DC, FICA, overtime rules, and deductions into a take-home figure calculated to the cent, entirely on-device. Or start with the overtime calculator for a single week and the take-home pay calculator for the full withholding picture.

This calculator gives estimates only, based on the rotation and figures you enter, and it is not tax, legal, or payroll advice. Your designated workweek moves the result, and so do your state's daily overtime rules and whatever your employer does about breaks and differentials. Check your pay stub and talk to your payroll department, your state labor agency, or an employment attorney about a specific situation.