A staffing rate card is a set of lines, one per earn code, that says what a worker is paid and what a client is billed for each kind of time: regular, overtime, double-time, on-call, and callback. It gets hard when the same week prices differently by state, and when pay rules and bill rules differ.
This piece uses round numbers to show the mechanics. It is not legal advice. Overtime rules change, and you should confirm the rules for your states with counsel.
What is a rate card made of?
Three things, and keeping them separate is most of the battle.
Earn codes. An earn code is a category of time: Regular, On-Call, Call Back. Each one can apply to pay, to billing, or to both, and can be hourly or a flat amount. This is the master list everything else is built from.
Where each code applies. Not every site or job uses every code. An emergency department role might carry on-call and callback. A warehouse role will not.
The rates themselves. A rate card holds a rate for each earn code, plus the overtime and double-time multipliers. There are two cards for every engagement: the bill-side card, agreed with the client for an account, site, and job, and the pay-side card for the worker.
In Time, Rates & Billing both cards are versioned and effective-dated, and a new version is approved before it goes live. When a contract rate changes on the 1st, shifts before the 1st keep the old rate and shifts after it get the new one.
Why are pay rules and bill rules different?
Because one is law and the other is a contract.
What you owe a worker for overtime is set by wage and hour law where the work happens. What a client owes you for that same hour is whatever the contract says. Some contracts pass overtime through at the same multiplier. Some cap it. Some require client approval before overtime is billable at all.
If a single spreadsheet formula handles both, one of them is wrong some of the time. This is a common source of the gap between what actually happened and what was signed: the hours are right, the rate is not.
How does overtime differ by state?
The federal baseline is weekly: overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate after 40 hours in a workweek. There is no federal daily overtime.
Some states add daily rules. California is the best-known example:
- 1.5 times after 8 hours in a day, and after 40 in a week
- 1.5 times for the first 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day of work in a workweek
- 2 times after 12 hours in a day, and after 8 hours on that seventh day
A few other states have their own daily or seventh-day rules. Alaska counts daily overtime after 8 hours, Colorado after 12, and Kentucky has a seventh-day rule. Most states follow the federal weekly baseline.
One more rule matters: hours are not counted twice. An hour already paid as daily overtime does not also count toward the weekly 40. This is usually called anti-pyramiding.
Worked example one: what does a single 13-hour shift cost in California?
A nurse works one 13-hour shift. Pay rate $50 an hour. Bill rate $85 an hour, and the contract passes overtime through at the same multipliers.
| Hours | Classification | Pay | Bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| First 8 | Regular | 8 x $50 = $400 | 8 x $85 = $680 |
| Next 4 | Overtime, 1.5x | 4 x $75 = $300 | 4 x $127.50 = $510 |
| Last 1 | Double-time, 2x | 1 x $100 = $100 | 1 x $170 = $170 |
| Total | $800 | $1,360 |
In a state with no daily rule, the same shift is 13 regular hours: $650 of pay and $1,105 of billing. Same person, same shift, a $150 difference in pay.
Worked example two: is the same week priced the same in two states?
A worker does four 12-hour shifts in a week, 48 hours, at a $40 pay rate.
Under the federal weekly rule: 40 regular hours and 8 overtime hours.
40 x $40 = $1,600, plus 8 x $60 = $480. Total $2,080.
Under the California daily rule: each 12-hour day is 8 regular and 4 overtime. Across four days that is 32 regular hours and 16 overtime hours. The regular hours total 32, which is under 40, so the weekly rule adds nothing more, and the daily overtime hours are not counted again.
32 x $40 = $1,280, plus 16 x $60 = $960. Total $2,240.
That is $160 more for an identical schedule. Multiply it by a few hundred workers and a multi-state agency has a real number riding on whether the right rule was applied to the right site.
Worked example three: how do on-call and callback price?
A surgical tech is on call for a 12-hour overnight shift, and gets called in for 2.5 hours.
- On-call: 12 hours at $4 an hour = $48
- Callback: 2.5 hours at $75 an hour = $187.50
- Total pay for the night: $235.50
On-call and callback are two earn codes, not one. On-call is the standby. Callback is a period actually worked during that standby, punched separately, with its own rate. Callback time is time worked, so it also counts toward the overtime totals above.
If both are lumped into one line, you cannot price them separately, bill them separately, or tell a client how often their on-call staff are really being called in.
Where do rate errors actually come from?
Rarely from arithmetic. Usually from one of these:
- The wrong rule for the site. A California site priced on the weekly rule, or the reverse.
- The wrong version of the rate. A contract rate changed and old shifts were re-priced, or new shifts were not.
- Missing codes. Callback hours recorded as regular hours, because there was nowhere else to put them.
- Bill and pay treated as one rule. Overtime paid correctly and billed wrongly, or the other way round.
- A rate that was never set. A new site goes live, nobody loads the card, and hours price at zero until someone notices.
How does software handle this?
The work is mostly about removing the places a person has to remember something.
In Mach 1, overtime is classified by rule rather than by formula: daily overtime and double-time, the weekly 40, the seventh consecutive day, and no double counting, using the site's own timezone so a shift that crosses midnight or a daylight saving change lands in the right day. Rule data covers the federal baseline and the states, with daily rules modeled for California, Alaska, Colorado, and Kentucky. An agency's own settings can make the rules stricter, never looser.
The rate for each shift is resolved from the rate cards and frozen onto the shift, with a record of why that rate applied. A shift with no resolvable rate is flagged for review. It is never silently priced at zero.
Approved hours then feed the invoice, where any line-level rate override requires a reason. For how those hours are captured and approved in the first place, see Scheduling & Shift Management and the piece on paper timesheets.