Overtime Pay

Overview

By default, the duration of paid leave (including paid absences) in FlowRota is calculated based on each employee’s contracted weekly hours.

If your employees regularly work overtime, you can enable the overtime pay setting in Admin → Overtime to include those extra accrued hours in paid leave and absence calculations. This ensures employees receive paid leave that accurately reflects their average working hours, not just their contracted hours.

This setting can also be turned off individually within each employee’s profile under the Allowances tab.

We have a helpful blog post about understanding reference periods and holiday pay that you may find helpful in addition to using this article.

Example Calculation

Suppose an employee’s contracted hours are 35 per week. Over a 52-week reference period, they average an additional 5 hours per week in overtime. If the overtime setting is enabled, one week of paid leave will be calculated based on 40 hours (35 contracted + 5 overtime). If the setting is disabled, only the contracted 35 hours are counted.

If an employee’s contracted hours or overtime vary throughout the reference period, FlowRota will pro-rate both accordingly to ensure accurate calculations.

Enabling Overtime in Leave Calculations

When the overtime setting is enabled, FlowRota adds any additional hours earned from overtime (based on the reference period) to the employee’s usual contracted hours when calculating paid leave or paid absence.

The length of the reference period used for these calculations can be configured by administrators in the Admin panel

If the overtime setting is disabled, paid leave and absences will not automatically include overtime. However, managers can still manually adjust individual leave requests to reflect additional pay if needed.

How Excess Working Time Is Calculated

FlowRota calculates excess working time by determining an employee’s average paid working minutes per working day over a defined reference period. This ensures working time is assessed fairly and consistently, even where hours vary from week to week.

Reference Period

Each organisation defines a reference period in weeks (for example, 17 or 52 weeks). The calculation looks back from the most recent fully completed work week , using fixed seven-day periods aligned to the organisation’s configured week start day.

All dates and times are normalised to UTC to ensure calculations remain consistent across daylight saving changes and server time zones.

What Time Is Included

Within the reference period, FlowRota includes all paid or payable time, including:

• Worked shifts
• Approved overtime or time in lieu
• Paid leave and approved paid absences
• Historical averaged data where an employee started part-way through the reference period

Unpaid absences, excluded entries, and non-accruing records are not counted.

Weekly Averaging

The reference period is divided into fixed seven-day blocks. For each block, FlowRota calculates the total paid minutes worked in that week.

If a week contains no working data and the employee did not start during the reference period, FlowRota may extend the calculation further back in time (up to a configurable limit) to ensure the average remains meaningful.

Open and Closed Days

To calculate a fair daily average, FlowRota determines how many days in the period were considered open working days .

A day is treated as open if it is normally worked according to the employee’s working pattern, fixed schedule, non-working day rules, or historical working data.

Average Minutes Per Day

Once total paid minutes are calculated, FlowRota:

• Calculates the average paid minutes per week
• Divides this by the average number of open working days per week

This produces the employee’s average minutes worked per working day .

Determining Excess

Excess working time is calculated by comparing the average daily working time against the employee’s expected working pattern:

• Zero-hours employees: all average daily time is treated as excess
• Fixed schedule employees: excess is the difference between the calculated average and the contracted daily hours
• Fixed variable employees: excess is the difference between the calculated average and the expected daily average based on contracted weekly hours

Excess values are never negative. If the calculation results in a negative value, it is treated as zero.

Consistency and Auditability

Because FlowRota uses fixed-length weeks and UTC-based timestamps, the same input data will always produce the same result. This ensures calculations remain consistent, auditable, and unaffected by daylight saving changes.