Overtime and Public Holiday Pay in South Africa

Ask a small business owner what a public holiday shift is supposed to cost and you'll usually get a shrug, or a guess. The BCEA doesn't leave it to guesswork: the multiples, the limits, and who they apply to are all written down. Below a certain salary, at least.

The three multiples

Overtime is paid at 1.5 times an employee's normal hourly wage. It has to be worked by agreement rather than imposed, though many contracts build in a standing agreement to work reasonable overtime when asked. Either way the BCEA caps how much overtime can be worked in a week, so "reasonable" has a hard limit sitting behind it, and that limit is lower than most people guess.

Sunday work splits in two depending on the employee's usual pattern. Someone who works on a Sunday but doesn't ordinarily work Sundays is paid double their normal wage for that day. If Sunday shifts are already a regular part of their week, the rate drops to 1.5 times instead. The distinction is about their normal working pattern, not about how they feel about giving up the day, which is a useful thing to be clear on before the conversation happens.

Public holidays work differently again. If a public holiday falls on a day an employee would normally work, they get the day off on full pay. Call them in instead and you owe at least double their normal daily wage, or their normal day's pay plus what they earned for the hours actually worked, whichever comes out higher. There is no version of working a public holiday that costs you the same as an ordinary day.

Above a certain salary, most of this stops applying

The BCEA sets an earnings threshold, and employees earning above it lose the automatic protection of the ordinary hours, overtime, Sunday pay and public holiday provisions above. They keep their other BCEA rights, leave included; it's specifically the hours-and-multiples part that falls away.

Below the threshold, everything in this guide applies without exception. Above it, the employment contract does most of the talking instead of the Act, which means your own paperwork becomes the thing that decides what a Sunday shift costs.

The threshold is reviewed periodically, so check the figure currently in force before you rely on it for a specific employee. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: assume someone is above it when they aren't and you've underpaid protected work.

Getting the right multiple applied to the right shift, for every employee under the threshold, is the calculation E·BIZI Pay runs automatically so it doesn't fall to someone doing mental maths on a Friday afternoon.