California
California overtime rules for field crews
The hardest state in the country to get right, and the one where getting it wrong is most expensive. California layers daily overtime, double time, a seventh-day premium, meal and rest periods and a split-shift premium on top of the federal weekly rule, and it lets employees enforce most of it themselves.
What the law requires
Overtime at one and a half times the regular rate past 8 hours in a workday or 40 in a workweek, and double time past 12 hours in a workday.
What it means on a crew
A crew working four ten-hour days has earned 8 hours of daily overtime even though the week totals only 40. Employers who track weekly totals alone miss it entirely, and it is the single most common way a field service payroll goes wrong in California.
What Punchless does
Both thresholds are computed per day, then the weekly rule promotes only what is still straight time - so an hour already paid as daily overtime is never counted twice. The statute's own no-combining sentence requires that, and it is asserted by test.
Every rule we enforce is published with the statute behind it and the test that checks it, so this is a claim you can verify rather than take on faith.
Other California rules
Verified against primary sources on August 3, 2026. Statutes and wage orders change, and some of this is genuinely unsettled - re-check the source before relying on it. Punchless is not a law firm and this is not legal advice.