Colorado has three overtime triggers, and you pay overtime on whichever produces the highest wage:
• Weekly OT after 40 hours in a workweek. • Daily OT after 12 hours in a workday. • Consecutive-hours OT after 12 consecutive hours worked, regardless of when the shift starts or ends, with short meal breaks (under 30 minutes) treated as continuous time.
All overtime is paid at 1.5× the regular rate. Colorado has no double-time premium. The consecutive-hours rule catches overnight shifts and split shifts that spreadsheet-based payroll typically misclassifies.
The three Colorado overtime triggers
All three rules come from the Colorado Overtime and Minimum Pay Standards (COMPS) Order, currently COMPS Order #39, issued by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment under authority of the Colorado Wage Act.
Hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek must be paid at one and one-half times the regular rate. The workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring 168-hour period (seven consecutive 24-hour periods) defined by the employer.
Hours worked in excess of 12 in a workday must be paid at one and one-half times the regular rate. The workday is the 24-hour period beginning at the same time each calendar day.
Note the threshold: 12 hours, not 8 as in California. A worker can log a 12-hour shift in Colorado with no daily overtime owed — though the 13th hour and beyond does trigger it.
Hours worked in excess of 12 consecutive hours, regardless of the starting and ending time of the workday and excluding bona fide duty-free meal periods, must be paid at one and one-half times the regular rate.
This is the trigger that catches shifts spanning midnight (where neither calendar day individually exceeds 12 hours but the consecutive span does) and split shifts with short breaks (where short meal breaks under 30 minutes don't interrupt the consecutive count).
The 30-minute meal-period rule
A duty-free meal period of 30 minutes or more interrupts the consecutive-hours count. A break under 30 minutes does not — short breaks merge with the surrounding work into one continuous block.
This sounds like a small distinction, but it produces materially different overtime liability for the same total hours:
- Worker shift: 6am–12pm (6h), 12pm–12:30pm meal break, 12:30pm–8pm (7.5h). Total worked: 13.5h. Meal break is 30 minutes — interrupts consecutive count. Two separate blocks of 6h and 7.5h. No consecutive-hours trigger; no daily trigger (under 12h either day-block). Only weekly overtime applies.
- Same worker, same hours, but meal break is 25 minutes (6am–12pm, 12pm–12:25pm break, 12:25pm–8pm). Total worked: 13.5h. Meal break is under 30 minutes — does not interrupt. Consecutive span: 6am to 8pm = 14 hours. 2 hours of consecutive-hours overtime.
If your timecard system records only clock-in/clock-out per shift and not the breaks within a shift, you may be miscalculating the consecutive-hours rule. The rule depends on knowing the duration of every break.
Worked example: the overnight shift
The most common way the consecutive-hours rule fires is the overnight shift spanning two calendar days:
| Day | Shift | Hours | Classification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | 8pm – 11:59pm | 4.00 | |
| Tue | 12am – 10am | 10.00 | |
| Tue | 8pm – 11:59pm | 4.00 | |
| Wed | 12am – 10am | 10.00 | |
| Thu | 8am – 4pm | 8.00 | |
| Fri | 8am – 4pm | 8.00 |
Neither Monday nor Tuesday individually triggered daily overtime — both calendar days had fewer than 12 hours. But the consecutive-hours rule caught the overnight span and added 2 hours of overtime to each. A spreadsheet that treats overtime as a per-calendar-day calculation would miss this entirely.
Common mistakes
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Calculating only weekly and daily, ignoring consecutive-hours.
The consecutive-hours rule is uniquely Colorado, and many out-of-state payroll systems don't have logic for it. They calculate weekly (over 40h) and daily (over 12h per calendar day) and stop there. For staffing workers on overnight shifts or split shifts with short breaks, this systematically under-classifies overtime.
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Treating split shifts as two separate shifts.
If a worker has a morning and afternoon shift on the same day with a short meal break in between, the break duration matters. Under 30 minutes: the two shifts merge into one consecutive block. Over 30 minutes: they're separate. Systems that record only daily totals without tracking break durations can't distinguish these cases.
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Adding a double-time premium that doesn't exist.
Colorado has no double-time rate. The maximum overtime premium is 1.5×, regardless of how many hours worked. A 20-hour shift in Colorado produces 12 hours of regular time and 8 hours of overtime — all at 1.5×. If you're applying 2× anywhere in a Colorado calculation, something is wrong.
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Counting meal-break time as worked time.
Colorado requires duty-free meal breaks (typically 30 minutes for shifts over 5 hours). That break time is unpaid and not counted as worked time — but the consecutive-hours rule treats it as interrupting the consecutive span only if the break is 30 minutes or more. Confusion between "is the break paid?" and "does the break interrupt the consecutive count?" leads to errors in both directions.
What you get with TimeCardCruncher
Colorado has the consecutive-hours rule most other payroll systems miss — the one that catches overnight shifts and split shifts with short meal breaks. You don't have to manually flag which shifts ran long enough, hand-check whether a meal break was long enough to reset the count, or worry about overnight spans across midnight being misattributed. Submit timecards with shift times and the math runs against every shift, every batch — invoices come back ready to defend under COMPS Order #39 if a wage-and-hour question comes up.
A note on data: the consecutive-hours rule needs clock-in/clock-out times to fire. If you submit Colorado timecards with just hour totals, TimeCardCruncher surfaces a warning so shifts that would otherwise trigger the rule aren't silently under-classified.