Overtime pay under the Employment Act multipliers.
Overtime pay
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Hourly rate
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Multiplier
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It starts with your hourly rate of pay
Overtime in Malaysia is not paid on your monthly salary directly. It is paid on an hourly rate of pay derived from that salary, and getting the derivation right is where most disputes begin. The convention this calculator uses follows the Employment Act 1955: take the monthly basic wage, divide by 26 to get the ordinary rate for a day, then divide by your ordinary working hours to get the hourly rate. The 26 comes from a standard month of working days, and it is the divisor the law uses for monthly-paid employees regardless of whether a given month has 28 or 31 calendar days.
Once you have that hourly rate, overtime is a multiple of it. The multipliers this tool applies are 1.5 for extra hours on a normal working day, 2.0 for work on a rest day, and 3.0 for work on a public holiday. Those headline numbers are widely used, but the underlying rules are more layered than a single multiplier suggests, and overtime entitlement itself depends on whether you are within the wage threshold the Act covers. Treat the multipliers here as the model and confirm the current rules with the Ministry of Human Resources.
Ten hours of overtime on a RM2,600 salary
Take a worker on a basic salary of RM2,600 a month, eight ordinary hours a day, who puts in 10 hours of overtime on normal working days. The calculator first finds the hourly rate, then applies the 1.5 multiplier.
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The arithmetic lands on RM187.50, and the calculator rounds the headline overtime figure to RM188 while it shows the hourly rate to the cent as RM12.50. Swap the day type to a rest day and the same 10 hours would pay at 2.0 times, and a public holiday at 3.0 times, so the multiplier choice matters far more than a few extra hours. These are the rates this calculator applies; verify the multipliers and the rate-of-pay rules with the Ministry of Human Resources.
Who is covered and where it gets complicated
This tool is for employees checking that overtime on a payslip looks right, and for small employers costing extra shifts. Two cautions matter. First, statutory overtime is an entitlement for employees within the Employment Act's coverage; staff above the wage threshold or in excluded roles may rely on their contract instead. Second, the multipliers apply to hours beyond your normal working hours, and rest-day and public-holiday pay have their own structure for the normal hours of that day before overtime even begins. So a full rest-day shift is not simply every hour at 2.0 times.
Getting the inputs right
Always confirm the basic salary used for the calculation, because allowances and incentive pay are usually excluded from the ordinary rate of pay. A worker who assumes overtime is computed on their gross package will expect more than the law delivers, and the disappointment usually surfaces on the first overtime payslip.
The divisor mistake employers make
The common error on the employer side is dividing the monthly wage by 30 instead of 26. On a RM2,600 salary that quietly drops the hourly rate from RM12.50 to about RM10.83, shortchanging staff on every overtime hour. If your overtime looks light, check which divisor your payroll used.
Is there a cap on overtime hours?
The Employment Act limits how much overtime an employee may be required to work, with monthly limits and rest-day protections. This calculator does not enforce that cap, so if you enter a very large number of hours it will still compute the pay. Check the current monthly limit with the Ministry of Human Resources.
Does overtime pay attract EPF and SOCSO?
Overtime is wages, so it generally feeds into your statutory contributions, though the treatment of specific allowances varies. Confirm the contribution treatment with KWSP for EPF and with PERKESO for SOCSO, since what counts as wages for each scheme is defined separately.