The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the standard workweek at 40 hours and assumes most employees will work five, eight-hour days in a row. For professions where longer days are standard, like healthcare or factory work, the norm is 10- or 12-hour shifts for fewer days per week. The law sets out that they can be compensated regularly for their first 40 hours, despite the longer number of hours per shift. In either case, after an hourly employee works 40 hours in the workweek, the law requires that they receive overtime pay. 

While most states follow the lead of the FLSA, each state has its own Labor Department and the rights to define their own labor laws. California and Kentucky are two states that have enacted a “7th Day Consecutive Overtime” law. If you have employees in either of those states, you’ll need to make sure the proper rules are configured in Kronos to stay compliant. 

California & Kentucky “Seventh Consecutive Day” Overtime Laws Explained

In most states, ‘overtime’ means hourly workers will receive 1.5 times their usual hourly pay. In addition to the over 40 hours overtime law, there are specific overtime rules for working seven consecutive days in a single workweek in both California and Kentucky. 

In these two states, any hours worked on the seventh day in a row be will be paid as overtime, regardless of how many hours the employee worked in the preceding 6 days. Additionally, in California, not only do workers receive overtime on the seventh day but if an employee works more than 8 hours on that day they are to receive twice their normal rate of pay for those hours.

Complicated, right? Fortunately, there are time and attendance features in Kronos that can be configured to handle this for you.

How to Create a Zone in Kronos for Compliance with “Seventh Consecutive Days” Worked Laws

If you have employees in Kentucky or California, you can configure your Kronos system to automatically take these special rules into account. With the proper configuration in place, your employees’ hours will be calculated to pay the desired overtime based on your company’s workweek. This is done by setting up a seventh consecutive day zone and creating or incorporating it into an existing combination rule, pay code distribution, and work rule, and then, finally, adding it to the pay rules for which this rule applies.

Creating Seventh Consecutive Day Zone in Kronos

To create this new zone, you’ll first need to log into Kronos; then you can follow the four steps below.

  1. Navigate to Setup, “Pay Policies, Work Rule Building Blocks and Zones.”
  2. Select “New.”
  3. Give the new zone a descriptive name (ex: “7th Consecutive Day Reset”).
  4. For the zone type, choose the “Consecutive Days Worked” option.

This “Consecutive Days Worked” option defines a block of time marked by a number of days in a row during which work was done. When this selection is made, the configuration fields that follow the Zone Type selection box will change.  

Configuring the New Zone

Many of the fields that are now present will be completed, but not all. You’ll want to review these and make sure they are correct for your company. The configuration should be based on your company’s work week. (Keep in mind if you have employees in both Kentucky and California who have different work weeks, you’ll need to configure more than one zone and attach accordingly within the combination rule).

The fields that will need information will be:

  • Number of Days
  • Days in a Row
  • Day of the Week
  • Reset on Day block

Once you’ve configured the settings correctly, click ‘Save & Return’ in the New Zone Rule window.

At this point, you’ve completed the creation of the New Zone rule. However, you will still need to update or add other building blocks within Kronos to complete the setup of this zone rule, including establishing the rule for each possible work week and testing to make sure it is applied correctly.