Overtime, shift, and holiday pay under prevailing wage
California's public works overtime floor is a statute: eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, then time and a half, under Labor Code section 1811 and section 1815. The actual rate a worker gets for a tenth hour, a Saturday, or a holiday is not in the statute. It is in the published wage determination for that worker's craft and county.
The short answer
Two different sources control premium pay on a California public works job, and mixing them up is where most certified payroll rate errors start.
- The statute sets the floor. Labor Code sections 1810 through 1815 require overtime pay once a worker passes 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week on public work, at not less than one and one half times the basic rate.
- The wage determination sets the real numbers. DIR publishes a separate determination for every craft in every county, and each one carries its own overtime, shift, Saturday, Sunday, and holiday schedule. Many determinations pay more than the statutory floor, including double time after a certain hour, and none of that detail lives in the Labor Code itself.
Read the statute to know when overtime is required. Read the determination to know what it pays.
The public works overtime floor: Labor Code 1810 to 1815
This chain of five sections is the oldest piece of California public works law still in force, and it reads like it:
| Section | What it does |
|---|---|
| 1810 | Declares that eight hours is a legal day's work on public work and that contracts must say so. |
| 1811 | Sets the limit itself: 8 hours in a calendar day, 40 hours in a calendar week, on public work. |
| 1812 | Requires the contractor to keep an accurate record of actual hours worked, each day and each week, for every worker. This is the record your certified payroll comes from. |
| 1813 | Sets a forfeit of $25 for each worker for each calendar day the 8 hour or 40 hour limit was exceeded without the overtime pay 1815 requires. The money goes to the public agency, not the worker. |
| 1815 | The pay rule: hours beyond 8 in a day or 40 in a week are allowed if the worker is paid not less than one and one half times the basic rate for the hours over 8 in that day. |
Put together, this is why a public works crew is on daily overtime, not just weekly overtime the way many private jobs run. A worker who does a 10 hour day on a 32 hour week has 2 hours of daily overtime that day even though the week never touched 40.
The general overtime law runs alongside it: Labor Code 510
Public works crews are still nonexempt California employees, so the state's general overtime statute, Labor Code section 510, applies at the same time as sections 1810 to 1815. In two situations it pays more than the 1.5x floor above:
- Past 12 hours in a single day, pay is double time, not time and a half.
- The seventh consecutive day worked in a workweek is paid at time and a half for the first 8 hours and double time for anything past 8 that day.
Neither rule is unique to public works. Both apply to nonexempt California employees generally, and on a public job they run on top of the 1810 to 1815 floor. The worker is owed whichever calculation pays more for the hour in question.
Where the shift, weekend, and holiday numbers actually come from
Nothing above tells you what a Saturday hour, a night shift, or Labor Day is worth. That comes from the general prevailing wage determination DIR publishes for the specific craft and county, looked up at dir.ca.gov. Every determination carries its own footnotes, and they differ by craft and by county. The Los Angeles County subtrades determination, for example, sets the Roofer classification's overtime rate to apply to the first two daily overtime hours and the first ten hours on Saturday, then switches to the Sunday and holiday rate for anything past that. A different craft two counties over can run a different schedule entirely, including a shift differential that applies to second and third shift base pay but drops away once the worker is into overtime, Saturday, Sunday, or holiday hours, which get their own rate instead of the shift premium stacked on top.
The practical rule: never carry an overtime, shift, or holiday number from one project or one craft to this week's payroll. Pull the current determination for this craft, this county, and this bid date, every time. Rate drift on a premium pay line is the kind of error a determination check catches before it becomes a filing, described in our prevailing wage vs certified payroll guide.
Holiday pay: which days, and whose calendar
Which days count as a paid holiday for prevailing wage purposes also comes from the determination, and it splits two ways:
- If the determination is based on a collective bargaining agreement, the paid holidays are whatever holidays that particular agreement recognizes for that craft, a fact stated directly in determinations such as the one for Los Angeles County subtrades.
- If the determination is not based on a collective bargaining agreement, the same page states the holidays default to the list in Government Code section 6700, California's statutory list of state holidays.
Either way, the holiday premium rate itself, whether it is time and a half, double time, or something else, is printed on the determination, not assumed from the calendar.
How this lands on your certified payroll filing
A statute and a determination do not file themselves. They end up as a rate in column 6A of the federal WH-347, and as matching hours and rates in California's DIR certified payroll records system. A worker with daily overtime shows two rows, ST for straight time and OT for overtime, with column 6A reflecting the determination's overtime, shift, or holiday rate, not a flat multiple guessed from the base rate. Getting that column wrong is one of the errors covered in our WH-347 line by line guide, and the kind of underpayment that can trigger the back wages and civil penalty under Labor Code section 1775, covered in our certified payroll penalties guide. Estimate the exposure on our certified payroll penalty calculator.
A five step check before you run premium pay
- Confirm the craft classification for the hours in question, not the worker's title.
- Pull the current determination for that craft and county from DIR, not a saved copy from an earlier job.
- Read the overtime footnote for that classification. Some determinations switch to the Sunday and holiday rate after a set number of shift or Saturday hours.
- Check whether the determination is collectively bargained, since that decides whether the paid holiday list comes from the agreement or from Government Code 6700.
- Match the rate to column 6A on the WH-347 and the corresponding certified payroll records fields before you file, not after a portal or an auditor flags it.