If an hourly field worker puts in more than 40 hours in a workweek, federal law requires overtime at one and a half times their regular rate of pay — and the count includes every job site they touched that week, plus the travel between sites. Most overtime violations in field service aren't owners refusing to pay; they're owners counting hours the wrong way. This guide covers the five mistakes that generate most of the liability, with the 2026 numbers verified against primary sources.
The short version: the federal exempt salary floor in 2026 is $684 per week ($35,568 per year) — the U.S. Department of Labor formally restored the pre-2024 rule in May 2026 after courts vacated the planned increases. New York sets a far higher bar for executive and administrative exemptions: $1,275.00 per week in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, and $1,199.10 per week in the rest of the state.
Overtime is measured per workweek — a fixed, recurring 168-hour period. It is never averaged across two weeks, never reset per client site, and never satisfied by comp time in the private sector. The overtime rate applies to the regular rate, which must blend multiple pay rates and include nondiscretionary bonuses — not just the base wage.
The stakes are not theoretical: the Department of Labor recovered $259 million in back wages for roughly 177,000 workers in fiscal year 2025 — about $1,465 per worker — and New York claims reach back six years with 100% liquidated damages on top.
What the federal overtime rule actually requires
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime pay of at least 1.5 times an employee's regular rate for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek, for every non-exempt employee. The DOL's Fact Sheet #23 defines the workweek as "a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods." You choose when it starts (Sunday midnight, Monday 6 a.m. — anything, as long as it stays fixed), and each workweek stands alone: averaging hours over two or more weeks is expressly not permitted.
Two things the FLSA does not require, which surprises owners in both directions: there is no federal daily overtime (a 14-hour Tuesday costs nothing extra if the week stays at 40 or under), and weekend or holiday work carries no premium by itself. What matters is one number — total hours actually worked for your company in the workweek.
Nearly every cleaner, porter, security guard, and maintenance tech is non-exempt. The exemptions that matter (executive, administrative, professional) require both a salary above the threshold and a duties test that front-line field work essentially never passes. Paying someone a salary does not make them exempt — a point covered in detail in Mistake 4.
The 2026 salary thresholds: federal floor reset, New York much higher
Federal: after the 2024 overtime rule was vacated by a federal court, the Department of Labor issued a technical amendment on May 14, 2026 restoring the 2019 regulations. The federal minimum salary for the executive, administrative, and professional exemptions is $684 per week ($35,568 per year), and the highly compensated employee threshold is $107,432 per year.
New York: the state sets its own, higher thresholds for the executive and administrative exemptions, and they rose on January 1, 2026: $1,275.00 per week ($66,300 per year) in NYC, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester, and $1,199.10 per week ($62,353.20 per year) in the rest of the state. New York has no separate state threshold for the professional exemption, so the federal $684 figure applies there. The 2026 minimum wage is $17.00 per hour in NYC, Long Island, and Westchester and $16.00 per hour elsewhere in the state.
The practical consequence for a tri-state field-service company: a site supervisor in Queens paid a $58,000 salary is below New York's $66,300 executive/administrative line, which means the exemption fails on salary alone — the supervisor is owed overtime regardless of duties.
Mistake 1: Counting hours per site instead of per workweek
Overtime attaches to the employee's total hours for your company in the workweek — not to any one building, client, or contract. If the same cleaner works 28 hours at an office building and 18 hours at a medical facility in the same week, that is 46 hours and 6 hours of overtime, even though neither site individually crossed 40.
This is the signature field-service failure mode because of how hours get recorded: each site has its own schedule, sometimes its own supervisor, sometimes its own paper sign-in sheet. Nobody sees the combined number until — best case — payroll, or worst case, a DOL investigator adds the sheets together. Splitting the work across two related companies you control usually doesn't help either: joint employment rules can combine the hours anyway, and structures built to dodge overtime draw exactly the scrutiny they're meant to avoid.
The fix is mechanical, not legal: every punch, at every site, has to land in one system keyed to the employee — so the 41st hour is visible before the week ends, not after the check is cut.
Mistake 2: Not paying for travel between job sites
Time spent traveling between job sites during the workday is work time. Federal regulation 29 CFR 785.38 is explicit: an employee who must travel from job site to job site after the workday begins is working during that travel. The ordinary home-to-work commute — before the first site and after the last — is not compensable under the Portal-to-Portal Act.
Labeled hypothetical: a guard finishes at Site 1 at 2:00 p.m., drives 45 minutes to Site 2, and works until 8:00 p.m. That 45 minutes is paid time, and it counts toward the 40-hour threshold. A guard doing that commute pattern five days a week accrues nearly four hours of work time that never appears on either site's schedule — which quietly becomes overtime in any week the scheduled hours already sit near 40.
Unpaid inter-site travel is doubly expensive in an audit because it creates two violations at once: unpaid straight time and, in over-40 weeks, unpaid overtime on top.
Mistake 3: Calculating overtime on the wrong rate
The 1.5 multiplier applies to the regular rate, not the base hourly wage — and the regular rate must include nearly all compensation for the week: shift differentials, nondiscretionary bonuses (attendance bonuses, production bonuses, promised incentives), and the blend of multiple hourly rates. Expense reimbursements, genuinely discretionary bonuses, and gifts stay out.
When an employee works at two rates in one week, the default federal method is the weighted average under 29 CFR 778.115. Labeled hypothetical: a tech works 30 hours of janitorial at $18 and 16 hours of floor care at $20 — 46 hours, $860 of straight-time pay. The regular rate is $860 ÷ 46 = $18.70. The overtime premium owed is 6 hours × half that rate (the straight-time portion is already in the $860), about $56.09 — total $916.09. Owners who instead pay time-and-a-half on the lower rate, or forget the premium entirely because "both rates were paid," underpay every such week.
A narrow alternative exists — FLSA section 7(g)(2) lets you pay overtime at 1.5 times the rate in effect during the overtime hours, but only with an agreement or understanding reached with the employee in advance and other conditions met. If you haven't set that up deliberately, the weighted average is the rule.
Bonuses work the same way: a $100 weekly attendance bonus paid to someone who worked 45 hours raises their regular rate, and the overtime premium must be recomputed on the higher rate. Skipping that recalculation underpays only a few dollars per week — but multiplied across a crew and a six-year New York lookback, small errors compound into five-figure exposure.
Mistake 4: Treating salaried supervisors and guards as automatically exempt
A salary is only half the test. To be exempt as an executive, an employee must be paid at least the applicable salary threshold and satisfy a duties test — for the executive exemption: management as the primary duty, regularly directing two or more full-time employees, and authority to hire or fire (or recommendations on hiring and firing that carry particular weight). A "working supervisor" who cleans or stands post most of the shift and directs a helper on the side generally fails the duties test no matter what the paycheck looks like.
In New York the salary half of the test is stricter than the federal one: $1,275.00 per week in the downstate counties in 2026. A common tri-state pattern — promoting a strong cleaner to "account manager" at a $55,000–$60,000 salary and stopping their overtime — fails on salary alone downstate, before the duties even get examined.
Misclassification is the most expensive overtime mistake because it silently zeroes out every overtime hour for as long as the title sticks, and because the employer usually has no time records for the person — which lets the employee's own estimate of hours carry more weight in a dispute.
Mistake 5: Comp time, averaging, and side agreements that don't hold up
Three practices owners believe are legal workarounds, and aren't. Comp time — an hour and a half off next week instead of overtime pay this week — is available only to public-sector employers under the FLSA; a private company using it is simply not paying overtime. Averaging — 46 hours one week, 34 the next, "it evens out to 40" — is expressly prohibited; each workweek stands alone and the 46-hour week owes 6 overtime hours regardless of the next one. And written agreements or waivers — an employee signing that they accept straight time for all hours — are void; courts have held for decades that FLSA rights cannot be waived by private agreement, so the signature protects nothing.
If any of these is currently part of your pay practice, it is not a gray area — it is accruing liability every pay period, and the records proving it are your own.
New York adds three more traps
Spread of hours: under New York's Miscellaneous Industries wage order (12 NYCRR 142-2.4), when the interval from an employee's first clock-in to last clock-out exceeds 10 hours — including unpaid breaks and split-shift gaps — the employer owes one extra hour of pay at the applicable minimum wage. A guard on a split shift (6–10 a.m. and 4–9 p.m.) triggers it even though only 9 hours were worked. New York DOL opinion letters have taken the position that, outside hospitality, employees paid sufficiently above minimum wage may not be owed the extra hour, but courts have not applied that offset uniformly — track the spread and get counsel's read on your pay levels rather than assuming it away.
Residential (live-in) employees earn overtime after 44 hours rather than 40 under the state wage orders — relevant to building superintendents and live-in porters.
The lookback: federal FLSA claims reach back two years (three if the violation is willful), with liquidated damages equal to the unpaid wages. New York Labor Law claims reach back six years, also with 100% liquidated damages. The same missed $56 premium from the Mistake 3 example, repeated weekly for one employee, is roughly $17,500 of exposure over a six-year New York lookback before damages double it. New York employers also owe every worker a compliant wage notice stating their regular and overtime rates — covered in our guide to New York wage notice requirements.
What overtime mistakes actually cost
In fiscal year 2025 the DOL's Wage and Hour Division recovered $259 million in back wages for roughly 177,000 workers — about $1,465 per worker — with FLSA violations accounting for over $184 million of it, up from just under $150 million in 2024. Those are only agency recoveries; private lawsuits, which is where most New York wage claims go, add attorney's fees on top of back pay and liquidated damages.
The arithmetic that matters to a 30-person cleaning or security company: an average of two undetected overtime hours per employee per week, at a $20 blended rate, is about $31,000 per year in unpaid premiums — before doubling for liquidated damages and before attorney's fees. Overtime errors are rarely one big event; they are a small leak multiplied by headcount and years.
The practical fix: one verified record of hours across every site
Every mistake above has the same root cause: no single, trustworthy record of when each person actually worked, across all sites, inside a defined workweek. The fix is a time clock the crew actually uses at every location, with the hours flowing into one place — so combined weekly totals, inter-site travel gaps, and blended rates are visible while the week is still open.
This is the problem StockPoint's verified time clock was built for: workers punch at a tablet kiosk with a 6-digit PIN, a selfie face check, and GPS geofencing (QR and passkey punching where kiosks don't fit), so every punch is tied to a real person at a real site. Hours from every location roll up per employee per workweek, and payroll exports to Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks, and Paychex carry the verified totals instead of per-site spreadsheets. Punch records that can't be edited invisibly also answer the question an investigator asks first: how do you know these hours are right? If falsified punches are part of your hours problem, see our companion piece on buddy punching in field crews.
None of this replaces a review of your classifications and pay practices — but it eliminates the data problem that turns honest owners into defendants.
Is overtime owed for weekends, holidays, or nights?
Not under federal law, and not under New York law for private employers, unless those hours push the workweek past 40 (or 44 for live-in residential employees). Weekend, holiday, and night premiums are a matter of your policy or a client contract — but if you do pay a shift differential, it must be folded into the regular rate before computing the overtime premium.
Do per diems and expense reimbursements count toward the regular rate?
Reasonable reimbursements for actual business expenses — mileage, supplies, tolls — stay out of the regular rate. But a flat payment that doesn't correspond to real expenses can be treated as disguised wages and pulled back into the rate, raising every overtime hour's cost retroactively. Keep reimbursements tied to actual, documented expenses.
What time records does the FLSA require me to keep?
For each non-exempt employee, the FLSA requires records including hours worked each day and each workweek, the basis of pay, the regular rate, and overtime earnings, with payroll records kept for at least three years and the time records behind them for two. In practice the record-keeping bar is higher than it sounds: in a dispute, an employer with no reliable time records generally loses the benefit of the doubt on how many hours were worked. Automatic, verified punch records satisfy this without a filing cabinet.
This article is general information for business owners, not legal advice — overtime classification and pay-practice decisions for your specific company should be reviewed with an employment attorney, who owns the final call.