Tools for New York Employees

Free, no-signup tools to help you understand where you stand before you talk to anyone, including us. Each one is an educational estimate, not legal advice.

What does the unpaid overtime calculator do?

It applies the statutory arithmetic to figures you enter. Overtime under federal and New York law is generally owed at one and one-half times your regular rate for every hour worked beyond 40 in a single workweek. If you are paid a weekly salary, New York divides that salary by 40 to find the regular rate rather than by however many hours you actually worked, which is why salaried employees who work 55-hour weeks are frequently owed more than they expect. The calculator works out the unpaid premium, multiplies it across the weeks you enter, and adds liquidated damages of 100% of the unpaid wages under N.Y. Labor Law § 198(1-a), which is the default unless the employer proves it had a good-faith basis for believing it was complying.

It also caps the lookback at 312 weeks, because the New York Labor Law reaches back six years. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act reaches only two, or three if the violation was willful, which is the main reason New York wage claims are usually worth substantially more than their federal equivalents.

What the calculator cannot tell you

Whether you have a claim. The arithmetic assumes you were non-exempt and that the hours you enter are the hours you worked. Both are contested in real cases: an employer will argue you were exempt, or that its time records are right and your recollection is not. The output is also incomplete in the other direction. It omits spread-of-hours pay, Wage Theft Prevention Act notice and statement penalties, prejudgment interest, and attorneys' fees, all of which are commonly recoverable. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a valuation.

If your pay problem is something other than straight overtime (a manager taking a cut of the tip pool, deductions for breakage or shortages, unpaid off-the-clock work, or being labeled an independent contractor while working as an employee), the wage and hour pages cover each of those, and the signs you are misclassified as exempt guide is the place to start if you are salaried.

What does the filing deadline checker do?

It takes the date something happened, plus a few facts about the employer and the claim, and lays out every deadline it can date, soonest first, flagging the ones that appear to have passed. New York runs several clocks at once and they are not close together. A federal discrimination charge must reach the EEOC within 300 days, State and City Human Rights Law claims generally allow three years in court, and unpaid wage claims under the Labor Law reach back six. For public employees the first deadline can fall in ninety days, and a federal employee has forty-five. The checker is built to err short, and where a deadline depends on facts it did not ask for it says so rather than guessing. The same material in prose is in how long you have to file.

What does the severance agreement checklist do?

It walks you through what to look for in an offer you have already received, and produces a list of points to raise. It covers whether the money is more than you were already owed, the review and revocation periods that apply if you are 40 or older, what the release actually takes, non-disparagement and confidentiality against the New York rules on nondisclosure terms, restrictive covenants carried over from your hire, references, equity, and unemployment. It is not a document analyser, it has no upload, and it never asks you to paste anything from your agreement. The longer treatment is on the severance review and negotiation page and in what to do before you sign.