Paid time is a contract question, not a maths question
There is no universal rule for what counts as work. There is your agreement, your local labour law, and the habit of whoever runs the rota. Where those three disagree, the agreement usually wins — which is why the honest answer to most questions in this topic starts with “check your contract” rather than a number.
What the site can do is make the arithmetic visible once you know the rule. Mark a break as unpaid and the counter freezes. Mark it paid and it keeps running. Either way the number you see matches the contract you described, instead of a default assumption baked in by someone else.
The five kinds of time that get argued about
| Type of time | Usually paid? | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Meal break, 30–60 min | No | Removes ~6% of paid hours on an 8.5 h day |
| Rest break, 5–20 min | Yes | Nothing — it stays inside paid time |
| Handover / briefing | Depends | Often unpaid in practice, paid on paper |
| Travel between sites | Usually yes | Commuting is not; the second site usually is |
| On-call standby | Allowance, not full rate | Adds a flat amount rather than hours |
Meal breaks are the expensive one
Half an hour a day is 130 hours a year — more than three working weeks. If your salary assumes those hours are paid and they are not, your real rate is lower than the one you have been quoting in conversations with yourself. The full arithmetic, including what it does to a $60,000 salary, is in are lunch breaks paid.
Handover is the one nobody writes down
In shift work, the fifteen minutes you spend briefing the next person is often the most genuinely work-like part of the day, and often the least recorded. Across a four-shift week that is an hour; across a year it is a working week and a half. It is not a rounding error — it is a policy gap.
Premium hours: when the rate itself changes
Most of this topic is about which hours are paid. The rest is about hours that are paid differently — and there are two mechanisms worth knowing.
Overtime multiplies the base rate
Overtime is a multiplier applied to your regular rate, not a new rate invented for the occasion. That distinction matters because the base rate is where disputes happen: if your regular rate was understated, every overtime hour is understated by the same proportion. The arithmetic and the four common errors are in how overtime is calculated.
Night differentials add to it instead
A shift differential is usually a flat amount or a percentage for hours inside a defined window — often something like 22:00 to 06:00. It is additive rather than multiplicative, and it frequently does not appear in the advertised hourly rate, which is why two people on the same contract can take home very different amounts. See night shift pay for what a differential is worth over a year.
Long shifts hide the biggest gap
A 12-hour shift is rarely 12 paid hours, and the shorter the working week, the more each unpaid hour costs proportionally. On three 12-hour shifts a week, losing 45 minutes a shift to breaks and handover is over 100 hours a year — nearly 6% of your paid life. That case is worked through in 12-hour shift pay.
What this topic covers
Five guides and two live tools. The guides are ordered from the most common question to the most specialised:
- Are lunch breaks paid? — the default assumption, and the two numbers it moves.
- How overtime is calculated — the multiplier, the base rate, and the traps.
- Night shift pay — differentials, premiums and what nights are worth over a year.
- 12-hour shift pay — how many of those hours are actually paid.
- Salary timer for shift workers — nights, rotas and shifts that cross midnight.
- Overtime pay calculator — what an extra hour is worth before you agree to it.
- Shift worker salary timer — a timer that handles overnight shifts correctly.
The denominator these rules produce feeds straight into what an hour is worth. The delay between working those hours and being paid for them is when the money arrives.