Overtime Labor Law Regulations in New York (NY)

New York state has an interesting overtime law, so let’s take a look at it here. It has some of the features of other state overtime labor laws, but in other respects New York labor overtime law is very unique. For instance, New York overtime law makes a point of differentiating between non-residential and residential workers.

This differentiation comes into play when looking at what New York considers a standard work week. For non-residential employees, or people who live outside the state but work in New York, the work week is a standard 40 hour work week. That’s the length of time that we see in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and most other state overtime labor laws.

However, when it comes to residential workers, or live-in workers, the length of the work week is 44 hours.

Either way, for both non-residential and residential workers, whenever they work over that length of time for the work week, they are entitled to overtime. That means that if you were a residential worker and put in 50 hours of time in a week, you would be entitled to time and a half for those overtime 6 hours. If you were a non-residential worker, you would get time and a half for 10 hours of work.

New York, though, like many states, sticks with the week length as the main determination for whether or not an employee gets overtime pay. Working more than 8 hours in a day doesn’t mandate overtime pay under New York law. And working on holidays and weekends doesn’t mean that you get overtime pay under New York law either.

Also, in New York, as under federal law and many states laws, has its own set of exclusions, or people who do not get overtime pay. These in New York are actually identical to ones included under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, so when we have time, I’ll have a separate blog just on those.