Sri Lanka Overtime (OT) Pay Calculator

Overtime in Sri Lanka is governed by two pieces of primary legislation and a stack of gazetted Wages Board decisions. The Shop and Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954 applies to most retail, office, BPO, hospitality and similar workers, while the Wages Boards Ordinance No. 27 of 1941 sets industry-specific minima for trades with their own boards. This calculator implements the rules that apply to the majority of workers — the standard wage-board convention combined with the floor that the S&O Act fixes by statute.

Section 3 of the S&O Act sets the normal working week at 45 hours. Section 5 requires a weekly day of rest. Section 6 caps overtime at 12 hours per week. Section 11 sets the payment floor: any hour worked beyond the normal day must be paid at not less than 1.5× the ordinary rate. Hours worked on a gazetted public, bank or mercantile holiday attract the wage-board convention of 2×.

The arithmetic this calculator runs:

1. Hourly rate. Two methods are offered:
   • basic ÷ 200— the Labour Department's convention for shop-and-office workers (default).
   • (basic × 12) ÷ (52 × weekly hours) — strict mathematical, useful when the contract specifies a non-45-hour week.
2. Per-category OT pay. For each bucket — weekday, weekly day-off, public-holiday — multiply hours by the hourly rate and by the statutory multiplier:hours × rate × multiplier.
3. Total.Sum the three category totals to get this month's OT pay. Adding the basic gives the gross to be paid this month.
4. §6 cap check. Divide weekday OT hours by the average weeks-per-month constant (52 ÷ 12 ≈ 4.33); if the result is above 12, a warning flags possible non-compliance. The cap is per-week, so the warning is informational — your actual weekly distribution may still be lawful.

By long-settled guidance under the EPF Act No. 15 of 1958, overtime pay is excluded from the "total earnings" base on which the 8% employee EPF, 12% employer EPF and 3% ETF contributions are computed. Overtime is therefore paid gross of those funds — the deduction you see on a payslip is taken from basic plus qualifying allowances, not from the OT line. If you want to confirm the fund deductions on the rest of your pay, run the same basic through the Sri Lanka EPF & ETF calculator. Income tax (APIT), however, does apply if your total monthly remuneration crosses the IRD's monthly relief threshold — for that, see the Sri Lanka income tax calculator.

Which hourly-rate basis should you use?

The two divisors usually land within a few rupees of each other, but they are not identical, and the gap matters once OT hours pile up. The basic ÷ 200 convention is what Labour Department inspectors apply and what the majority of Sri Lankan payslips print, so it is the safer default if you are checking whether your employer has under-paid you. The (basic × 12) ÷ (52 × weekly hours) derivation is stricter and only pulls ahead when your contract fixes a working week that is not 45 hours — a 40-hour office week, say, produces a higher hourly rate because the same monthly salary is spread over fewer normal hours. When the two figures disagree, the calculator shows both so you can take the dispute to your HR department with the arithmetic already done.

Edge cases the calculator handles

A few situations trip people up. Mixed-rate months — where you log weekday, rest-day and public-holiday OT in the same month — are handled by keeping each bucket on its own multiplier and summing only at the end, so a public holiday is never accidentally paid at the 1.5× weekday rate. Sub-hour overtime is supported because the hours fields accept half-hour steps; 30 minutes of OT is entered as 0.5 and paid pro-rata. Richer collective agreementsare handled through the "Adjust OT multipliers" panel: if your union contract pays 2× on weekdays or 2.5× on holidays, enter those figures and the floor checks still stop you from going below the statutory 1.5× minimum. Finally, the §6 weekly-cap check is deliberately a soft warning, not a hard error — it divides your monthly weekday OT by 52 ÷ 12 ≈ 4.33 weeks to estimate a weekly average, but because the cap is genuinely per-week, an uneven month (one very busy week, three quiet ones) can stay lawful even when the average warning fires.

Where overtime sits in the rest of your pay

Overtime is the one line on a Sri Lankan payslip that is calculated from your basic and paid free of the provident funds. That combination has three practical consequences worth knowing before you check a payslip.

First, a low basic with a tall stack of allowances quietly suppresses your OT rate, because the multiplier is applied to the basic-derived hourly rate and not to gross pay. Two people on the same Rs 90,000 gross can be owed materially different overtime if one of them has a Rs 40,000 basic and the other a Rs 75,000 basic. If your basic looks suspiciously thin, check it against the national floor with the Sri Lanka minimum wage calculator before arguing about the OT line itself.

Second, because overtime is outside the EPF and ETF base but inside the APIT base, a heavy-OT month raises your taxable remuneration without raising your retirement savings. The take-home effect is therefore smaller than the headline OT figure suggests once the tax table catches up — the take-home salary calculator shows the net figure for a given month once basic, OT and deductions are all in play.

Third, overtime is settled month by month and does not carry forward. It is not part of the ordinary rate used to pay annual leave, and it is not part of the last-drawn basic used for gratuity. A busy final quarter before a resignation therefore does not raise your terminal benefits, however much OT it contained. If you are also tracking statutory leave, the annual leave calculator works out the entitlement that OT hours do not affect.

A 30-second sense-check on any payslip

Divide the overtime amount on the payslip by the number of OT hours you actually worked. The answer is your effective OT rate per hour. Divide that by your basic ÷ 200 and you have the multiplier your employer actually applied. If it comes out at 1.0 you are being paid ordinary time for overtime hours; if it comes out between 1.0 and 1.5 you are being under-paid against the §11 floor; if it lands at 1.5 or above on weekdays and 2 or above on gazetted holidays, the payslip is compliant. Where the numbers do not reconcile, the Department of Labour accepts complaints from employees directly at any District or Sub Labour Office, and your own contemporaneous record of hours worked is the evidence that matters most.

One thing the calculator deliberately does not do is fold overtime into end-of-service entitlements. Gratuity under the Payment of Gratuity Act is computed on your last drawn basic wage, not on basic plus OT, so a month of heavy overtime does not inflate the gratuity you are owed — work that out separately with the Sri Lanka gratuity calculator when you leave a job.

• Department of Labour Sri Lanka — Shop & Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954
• Department of Labour Sri Lanka — Wages Boards Ordinance No. 27 of 1941 and gazetted wage-board decisions
• Department of Labour Sri Lanka — official site (hourly-rate guidance for shop-and-office workers)
• Government of Sri Lanka — gazetted public, bank & mercantile holidays
• Inland Revenue Department — APIT/PAYE on monthly remuneration (overtime is part of gross for APIT but excluded from EPF/ETF)

Statutory references on this page were last cross-checked against the Department of Labour's official site on 2026-05-12. The page is reviewed when a new Wages Board gazette or amending Act changes the rules.