Overtime Pay Calculator

Worked examples at different hourly rates

Take a Constable with an hourly rate of around £16.50 (roughly in line with a mid-scale post-2013 Constable salary once converted to an hourly figure). Four hours of casual rest day overtime at 1.333x works out at £16.50 × 1.333 × 4 hours, which comes to a little over £88 gross for those four hours, compared with £66 if it were paid at the plain hourly rate. The same four hours at short notice, paid at 1.5x, comes to £99. On a public holiday, at 2.0x, the same four hours comes to £132 — exactly double the plain-rate figure.

Now take a Sergeant with an hourly rate of around £24.50, reflecting a typical point on the Sergeant scale. A single eight-hour rest day shift worked at short notice, at 1.5x, comes to £24.50 × 1.5 × 8, or £294. The same shift on a public holiday, at 2.0x, comes to £392 — a difference of £98 for the same eight hours, purely because of which day it fell on and how much notice was given.

These figures are useful for sense-checking your own payslip: if you know your hourly rate and the number of hours at each multiplier, you can work out roughly what you should expect to see, and the calculator will do this arithmetic precisely once you enter your salary and the hours worked at each rate.

Unsocial hours: a separate enhancement, not a multiplier

It's worth being clear that the unsocial hours enhancement is a different mechanism from the overtime multipliers above, and the two are not mutually exclusive — they can both apply to the same hours. Any hours worked between 8pm and 6am attract a 10% enhancement on top of the normal hourly rate, regardless of whether those hours are part of your normal rostered shift or overtime.

This means a rest day overtime shift that falls partly or wholly within the 8pm to 6am window can attract both the relevant overtime multiplier (1.333x, 1.5x or 2.0x depending on notice and whether it's a public holiday) and the separate 10% unsocial hours enhancement on the same hours. The calculator handles this combination for you, but it's useful to understand conceptually: the unsocial hours enhancement is calculated as an addition to the base rate, and the overtime multiplier is then applied to the combined rate, or the two figures are otherwise added together depending on the specific shift pattern — either way, working unsocial overtime hours is more valuable per hour than working the same overtime hours during the day.

Why overtime is not pensionable — and what that means for retirement planning

Neither overtime payments nor the unsocial hours enhancement count as pensionable pay under the Police Pension Scheme 2015. This is a deliberate feature of the scheme design, and it has a real consequence for anyone thinking about retirement income: no matter how much overtime you work, none of it adds to your pension contribution base, and none of it increases the pensionable pay figure used to calculate your CARE pension accrual for that year.

This matters most for officers who lean heavily on overtime to boost their take-home pay over a sustained period, perhaps to cover a mortgage, save for a house deposit, or build up savings. It's entirely sensible to use overtime for those purposes, but it's worth being clear-eyed that this income doesn't do double duty by also building your retirement pot the way a permanent pay rise or promotion would. If you're relying on overtime as a significant and ongoing part of your income, it's worth separately considering whether you're contributing enough elsewhere — whether through the main pension, Additional Voluntary Contributions, or other retirement savings — to reach the retirement income you're aiming for, rather than assuming your overtime years will automatically be reflected in a correspondingly higher pension.

Converting annual salary to an accurate hourly rate

To calculate overtime pay correctly, you first need an accurate hourly rate, and it's easy to get this slightly wrong by using a rough approximation rather than the standard method. The conventional approach is to take your annual salary and divide it by the standard annual hours for a full-time officer — typically based on a 40-hour week multiplied by 52.14 weeks (accounting for the extra fraction of a week in a year beyond 52 whole weeks), giving an annual hours figure, and then dividing salary by that figure to arrive at an hourly rate.

Using a simpler but less accurate method — for example dividing by 52 weeks exactly, or assuming a round number of annual hours — can produce an hourly rate that's out by a percent or two, which sounds small but compounds meaningfully across a year of overtime shifts, especially at the 2.0x public holiday multiplier. If you work part-time, your hourly rate is calculated the same way as a full-time officer's (based on the full-time equivalent salary for your scale point), since overtime hours themselves are typically hours worked beyond your normal contracted pattern, paid at the same hourly rate a full-time colleague on the same scale point would receive.

How overtime interacts with tax: the cumulative PAYE effect

One of the more confusing aspects of overtime pay is how it appears to be taxed more heavily than normal pay in the month it's received, even though your annual tax liability doesn't actually increase because of when the pay landed. This happens because of how PAYE (Pay As You Earn) works on a cumulative basis throughout the tax year.

Each time you're paid, HMRC's system effectively asks: if you carried on earning at this month's rate for the rest of the year, what would your total annual tax bill be, and how much of that should have been collected by now? If you have a particularly high-earning month — for example because it includes a large amount of overtime — the system temporarily assumes you might earn at that elevated rate all year, which can push a chunk of that month's pay into a higher tax band than it would sit in if spread evenly across the year, resulting in more tax being withheld than will ultimately be due.

The important point is that this is usually a timing effect rather than a permanent overpayment. Because PAYE is cumulative, if your income returns to a normal level the following month, the system recalculates based on your year-to-date earnings and tax paid, and it will typically correct itself automatically, refunding some of the apparent overpayment through a smaller-than-usual tax deduction in a subsequent pay period. Over a full tax year, someone who works a lot of overtime in some months and less in others should end up paying broadly the correct total tax, even though individual payslips can look uneven along the way. This is worth remembering before assuming a heavily taxed overtime payslip means you've been overcharged — in most cases it evens out without you needing to do anything, though if your income situation is unusual (for example if you leave a role partway through the year without further employment) it's worth checking with HMRC or completing a tax return where relevant.

TOIL versus cash: the trade-offs

Many forces allow overtime to be taken as Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) rather than, or as well as, cash payment, and the right choice depends on your personal circumstances. Taking TOIL means the hours worked are banked and can be taken as time off later, generally without any tax or NI implications at the point the overtime is worked, since no extra pay is received at that time — the tax position instead reflects your normal salary as usual.

Cash payment gives you the money immediately, subject to tax and NI in the period it's paid (with the cumulative PAYE effect described above potentially applying), but it doesn't give you any extra time away from work. Some officers prefer TOIL because it offers flexibility for things like childcare, personal appointments or simply additional annual leave, and because untaxed time off can feel more valuable hour-for-hour than overtime pay that's been reduced by tax and NI. Others prefer cash, particularly if they have a specific savings goal, are trying to increase income for a mortgage application, or simply find it more straightforward to bank the money than to find a convenient time to take TOIL, which can be harder to schedule during busy periods or when a team is short-staffed.

It's worth checking your force's specific policy on TOIL accrual limits and expiry, since unused TOIL that isn't taken within a set period can sometimes be lost or automatically paid out, and the rules differ between forces.

Keeping track of overtime for querying your payslip

Given how many variables affect overtime pay — the base hourly rate, which of the three multipliers applies, whether the unsocial hours enhancement also applies, and how PAYE happens to be treating that particular month — it's easy for a payslip to look wrong even when it's correct, and equally easy for a genuine error to go unnoticed if you're not keeping your own record.

A simple, practical habit is to note down, shift by shift, the date, the number of hours worked, whether it was a rest day (and if so, how much notice you were given), whether it fell on a public holiday, and whether any of the hours fell within the 8pm to 6am unsocial hours window. Keeping this alongside your rostering system or duty management system record means that if a payslip figure looks different from what you expect, you have your own working to compare it against, rather than relying on memory. This is particularly useful when querying a payslip with your force's payroll team, since being able to say precisely which shifts you believe were miscalculated, and at what rate you expected them to be paid, makes it far quicker for payroll to investigate than a general query that the total "looks low." The overtime calculator on this site is a good way to sense-check your own log against expected pay before raising a query, since it applies the standard multipliers and enhancements consistently.

How overtime and location allowance interact for pensionable pay purposes

Officers who receive a location allowance sometimes assume that, because part or all of their allowance is pensionable, their overtime earnings must somehow be affected too. It's worth being clear that these two things are calculated entirely independently. Location allowance, whether Metropolitan or South East, affects your salary and pensionable pay baseline, and it is this baseline — your basic hourly rate derived from salary plus any pensionable elements folded into your standard pay — that overtime multipliers are then applied to. Once your hourly rate has been established from that baseline, the overtime pay itself, and the unsocial hours enhancement where applicable, remain entirely non-pensionable regardless of how much of your underlying salary is pensionable.

In practice, this means an officer with a higher location-allowance-adjusted hourly rate will see a higher cash amount for the same hours of overtime compared with a colleague on an identical rank and scale point without the allowance, simply because their starting hourly rate is higher — but neither officer's overtime adds anything at all to their pension in either case. If you're trying to understand your total gross pay for a period that includes both location allowance and overtime, it's worth calculating each separately, using the location allowance and overtime calculators on this site, and then combining them, rather than assuming one affects the calculation of the other.

Overtime and part-time working

If you work part-time, overtime is generally calculated using the same hourly rate as a full-time colleague on the same scale point, since your hourly rate reflects your rate of pay rather than your contracted hours. Where it becomes more nuanced is in defining what counts as overtime in the first place: for a part-time officer, hours worked beyond your own contracted pattern — even if they're still below what a full-time colleague's normal working week would be — may be treated differently depending on your specific force's policy and whether those additional hours are being worked as a rest day, a short-notice call-in, or simply extra hours within what would otherwise be a full-time working pattern.

This distinction matters because the overtime multipliers described in this guide typically apply specifically to rest day and public holiday working, rather than simply to any hours worked beyond your normal part-time contract. If you work part-time and are regularly picking up additional hours, it's worth clarifying with your force exactly how those additional hours are classified and paid, since the answer affects both the rate you're paid and, in some circumstances, how the hours are treated for other purposes. The overtime calculator on this site uses your hourly rate correctly regardless of your contracted hours, but the classification of which of your worked hours count as overtime under the relevant multipliers is a separate question best confirmed with your own force's rostering or HR policy.