Overtime Labor Laws in Alabama

When we talk about state overtime laws, many of these state laws are interesting because they have different statutes and exemptions that make them unique among their 49 other counterparts. With Alabama, though, its overtime laws are unique because the state doesn’t have any.

The only law that Alabama has regarding wages and hours for employees deals with paying wages. And this basically means that Alabama makes sure that employees get paid what they’re owed by their employers every week. As for overtime, and everything else that has to do with payments and employment, Alabama defers to the federal laws.

The main federal law on overtime—and thus the law that we need to know about for Alabama law—is the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA for short. The gist of this law is that employers who have employees work overtime have to pay them for their time. They don’t have to just pay them. They have to pay them at least 1.5 times their standard pay for any time over 40 hours in week.

The federal overtime act doesn’t, though, limit the amount of time that employees age 16 or older can work, and the rules don’t mandate that employers have to pay their employees overtime for work on weekends or holidays.

All that the federal government is concerned about for the most part—and what we should know about—is that a workweek is defined as a set and recurring time period of 168 hours, or if we do the math, seven consecutive days of 24 hours. That doesn’t necessarily mean Sunday to Sunday or Monday to Monday, mind you.

There are also definitions that the federal rule puts in there that we could comment on, such as the one that states that an employee’s regular pay cannot be less than the minimum wage. The law also explains that payments can be in the form of piece-rate, commissions, salaries, but that whichever way you use, the payment for overtime is figured out by averaging out an hourly rate.

The Alabama Complete Labor Law poster will detail all of the most recent Alabama labor laws as well as the federal labor laws.