Overtime Labor Law Regulations in the State of South Carolina (SC)

The state of South Carolina has no overtime law of its own. That means there are no laws on the books in South Carolina to cover how much employers should pay their employees for overtime, or to determine exactly when employers ought to pay overtime.

There are federal laws for this, though, and South Carolina employees and employers are mandated to follow those federal laws. These federal laws can be found in the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA for short.

The main gist of the laws in the Fair Labor Standards Act is that employers should set 40 hours as the standard work week length for their full-time employees. But if they have to have their employees work longer than those 40 hours in a seven-day period, then the employers must pay those employees time and a half, at least, for all time spent working over those 40 hours.

Not all employers and employees in South Carolina, however, are covered by this law. The federal law makes a differentiation, for instance, between salaried workers and those paid by the hour. In many cases, the salaried worker does not get entitled to overtime pay no matter how many hours he or she works in a week. The hourly worker, on the other hand, usually does get paid overtime past that 40 hour period.

Of course, as we know from looking at other state laws on overtime, nothing is so clear cut. And some salaried workers are entitled to overtime pay. One of the main ways that the federal law tells us to figure out who gets overtime and who doesn’t is the “bona fide” rule for salaried workers.

In other words, the federal law states, if an employee works in a position that’s a bona fide administrative, professional, or executive role, then that person is not entitled to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.