Police Overtime Rules and Rates

Standard overtime and rest day working: time-and-a-third

The baseline rate for casual overtime — extra hours worked beyond your normal shift pattern — and for rest day working where you've had reasonable notice (15 days or more), is 1.333 times your basic hourly rate. This is often called "time-and-a-third" and is the default rate you'll see for most planned extra duty, whether that's staying on for an hour after your shift to finish paperwork, covering a colleague's shift that was arranged well in advance, or working a rest day that was scheduled with plenty of lead time.

Take a worked example. Suppose you're a constable at pay point PP4, earning a salary somewhere in the range that this site's Pay Scales article covers, and your basic hourly rate works out to £16.50 an hour (annual salary divided by roughly 2,087 contracted hours, assuming a 40-hour week). If you work three hours of standard-notice overtime, the calculation is straightforward: £16.50 x 1.333 x 3 hours = £82.35 gross, before tax, National Insurance and any student loan deduction are applied. Compare that to your normal rate for those same three hours, which would only be £49.50 — the 1.333x multiplier adds a meaningful uplift, which is exactly why overtime remains a popular way for officers to increase their income when the demand for extra hours is there.

It's worth being clear about what counts as "standard notice" in this context. The key distinction the service draws is between rest day working arranged with at least 15 days' notice and rest day working arranged with less. Casual overtime — extra hours on top of a normal working day, rather than working an entire rest day — is generally paid at the 1.333x rate regardless of notice, because the nature of casual overtime is inherently often short-notice by definition (you're being asked to stay on or come in at comparatively short notice for operational reasons), but the specific rest day multiplier structure is what really changes based on notice given.

Short-notice rest day working: time-and-a-half

Where you're asked to work a rest day with less than 15 days' notice, the rate jumps to 1.5 times your basic hourly rate — time-and-a-half. This exists for a straightforward reason: asking an officer to give up a rest day at short notice is more disruptive to their personal life than asking well in advance. Plans have to be cancelled, childcare has to be rearranged, and the officer has less time to adjust. The higher rate is a form of compensation for that disruption, and it also creates a financial incentive for forces to plan rest day working further ahead where operationally possible, rather than defaulting to late changes.

Using the same £16.50 hourly rate from the earlier example, a full eight-hour rest day worked at short notice would be calculated as £16.50 x 1.5 x 8 hours = £198.00 gross. Compare that to the same eight hours at the standard 1.333x rate, which would come to £176.16 — a difference of nearly £22 for the same eight hours, purely because of the notice period given. Over a year, if an officer regularly picks up short-notice rest day shifts, that difference adds up meaningfully.

The 15-day threshold is a clear line: notice given on day 15 or earlier qualifies for the standard rate, and notice given with fewer than 15 days remaining before the rest day in question triggers the higher rate. If you're ever unsure which rate applies to a particular shift on your payslip, it's worth checking the date the request was made against the date of the rest day itself, and querying your force payroll team if the figures on your payslip don't seem to match.

Public holiday working: double time

Working on a public holiday — Christmas Day, New Year's Day, bank holidays and the like — is paid at double your basic hourly rate, regardless of how much notice you were given. This is the highest of the standard overtime multipliers and reflects both the disruption of working on days that are widely treated as time off across the country, and the fact that public holidays often coincide with family occasions that are harder to reschedule than an ordinary rest day.

Using the £16.50 hourly rate again, an eight-hour shift worked on a public holiday comes to £16.50 x 2.0 x 8 hours = £264.00 gross. This is significantly more than either of the rest day rates, and it's one of the reasons public holiday shifts are often keenly sought after by officers who are happy to work through them in exchange for the higher pay, while others prefer to protect that time for family reasons and take it as TOIL or simply avoid picking up the shift where they have a choice.

One point worth flagging: if a public holiday shift also happens to fall within unsocial hours (8pm to 6am), the 10% unsocial hours enhancement applies in addition to the double-time rate, since the two are calculated separately and then combined — more on that below.

Unsocial hours: a separate enhancement, not an overtime rate

It's easy to conflate unsocial hours payments with overtime, but they're calculated on different bases and it's worth keeping them distinct in your head. The unsocial hours enhancement is a flat 10% addition to your basic hourly rate for any hours worked between 8pm and 6am, and it applies whether or not those hours are overtime. If you're working your normal, contracted night shift as part of your regular rota, you'll still receive the unsocial hours uplift for the portion of that shift that falls within the 8pm to 6am window, even though you're not doing anything "extra" in the overtime sense.

Where it gets more interesting is when unsocial hours and overtime overlap — for example, you're asked to work a short-notice rest day shift that runs from 10pm to 6am. In that case, the two enhancements stack: you get the 1.5x short-notice rest day multiplier and the 10% unsocial hours enhancement, both applied to your basic hourly rate for those hours. Practically, this is usually calculated as the overtime multiplier applied first, with the 10% unsocial uplift added on top of the basic rate component, though the exact mechanics can vary slightly by force payroll system — what matters is that both enhancements should show up somewhere on your payslip if you've worked overtime hours that also fall in the unsocial window.

To illustrate: eight hours of short-notice rest day working, entirely within the unsocial hours window, at a £16.50 basic hourly rate, would be roughly £16.50 x 1.5 x 8 = £198.00 for the overtime element, plus £16.50 x 0.10 x 8 = £13.20 for the unsocial hours enhancement, giving a combined gross figure in the region of £211.20 for the shift. The exact wording and line-item breakdown will vary by force, but the underlying principle — two separate enhancements calculated independently and then added together — is consistent.

TOIL versus cash: how officers choose

For most overtime and rest day working, officers have a choice between taking payment in cash or banking the time as time off in lieu (TOIL), sometimes described as time off in lieu of overtime. The choice isn't always entirely free — force policy, workforce planning needs, and caps on how much TOIL can be accrued before it needs to be used or paid out all come into play — but where there is a genuine choice, it's worth thinking through which suits your circumstances.

Cash payment has the obvious appeal of showing up in your bank account fairly promptly, and it can be useful if you have a specific financial goal, an upcoming expense, or simply prefer the certainty of money now over time off that has to be scheduled and approved later. The downside is that overtime pay is taxed in the same pay period it's received, so a large chunk of overtime in one month could, in some circumstances, be taxed at a higher marginal rate for that portion of your income than your normal salary would attract — more on this below.

TOIL, by contrast, gives you additional time away from work rather than money. Because you're not being paid the additional amount, there's no immediate tax event — the "cost" isn't taxed the way cash overtime is, though your normal salary continues to be taxed as usual while you take the time off, since you're simply not working during that period rather than being paid an extra taxable amount. TOIL can be particularly attractive for officers who value flexibility around family commitments, want to bank time for a longer break later in the year, or who are already near the upper end of their normal tax band and would rather not add extra taxable income in a single pay period.

There's no universally "correct" choice — it depends on your personal financial situation, how much annual leave and rest time you already have, and what your force's TOIL policy allows in terms of accrual limits and how long you have to use banked time before it expires or is paid out. It's worth discussing with your line manager or Federation representative if you're unsure what your force's specific TOIL rules are, since these details aren't standardised nationally in the same way the pay multipliers are.

Why overtime isn't pensionable, and what that means

A detail that catches some officers by surprise is that overtime payments — along with the various multiplier enhancements and the unsocial hours uplift — do not count as pensionable pay under the 2015 Police Pension Scheme (PPS 2015). This has two practical consequences worth understanding.

First, overtime doesn't contribute to your CARE pension accrual. Under PPS 2015, your pension builds up as a percentage of your pensionable pay each year, added to your pension pot and revalued annually. This is different from your basic salary and most standard allowances, which generally do count towards pensionable pay (rules can vary by allowance type, so it's worth checking your specific force's position on any allowance you're unsure about).

Second, because overtime doesn't count as pensionable pay, it also doesn't affect which pension contribution tier you sit in. Contribution tiers under PPS 2015 are banded — 12.88% up to £37,035 of pensionable pay, 13.88% up to £79,587, and 14.22% above that — and these bands are based on your pensionable salary, not your gross pay including overtime. So even if a busy year of overtime pushes your total gross earnings up substantially, your pension contribution rate is still calculated against your basic pensionable salary alone, not the inflated total. This is worth bearing in mind if you're trying to estimate your own pension contributions or checking them against your payslip — the figures won't match if you're comparing contribution rates against gross pay rather than pensionable pay specifically. The Pension Calculator on this site can help you see how your basic pensionable pay translates into contribution tier and annual accrual, separate from any overtime you might also be earning.

How overtime interacts with your tax

Because overtime pay is added to your gross pay for whichever pay period it's received in, it's taxed through PAYE alongside your normal salary for that period, using your existing tax code. For most officers, this doesn't cause any real complication — the extra income is simply added to your taxable pay for the month and taxed at your normal marginal rate.

Where it can get more interesting is if a particularly heavy period of overtime pushes part of your income for that pay period into a higher tax band than you'd normally be in. Income tax under PAYE is generally calculated cumulatively across the tax year, so a single unusually high month doesn't permanently change your tax code or your overall tax liability for the year — if you're overtaxed in one month because of a spike in overtime, that typically evens out over subsequent months as the cumulative calculation catches up, assuming your income returns to a more typical level. But it's still worth being aware that a very overtime-heavy month can mean your payslip shows a bigger tax deduction than you might expect, even though the underlying annual tax bill works out correctly once averaged across the year.

This is one of the reasons some officers prefer TOIL over cash for occasional bursts of extra work — it avoids the psychological effect of seeing a large tax deduction in a single month, even though, over a full tax year, cash overtime and an equivalent salary increase would generally be taxed the same way in total. If you're doing a lot of regular overtime and want to understand how it's likely to affect your take-home pay and tax position across the year, the Police Pay Calculator and Overtime Pay Calculator on this site let you model different scenarios using your actual tax code and circumstances. As with all tax matters, this article explains the general mechanics rather than giving individual tax advice — if your circumstances are unusual or you're unsure how a particular pay pattern will affect your tax position, it's worth checking with HMRC directly or speaking to a qualified adviser.