PunchPhilippines Overtime Rules: The 8-Hour Day, the 25% Premium, Night Shift Differential, and Holiday Pay (2026)
Philippines Overtime Rules: The 8-Hour Day, the 25% Premium, Night Shift Differential, and Holiday Pay (2026)
The short answer: Philippine overtime starts after eight hours in a day, not after forty in a week. Each hour past eight on an ordinary working day is paid at the regular wage plus at least 25%. Work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. earns a night shift differential of at least 10% on top of whatever rate applies. A scheduled rest day or a special non-working day adds 30%. A regular holiday pays double. And the Omnibus Rules require an individual daily time record for every employee, kept for at least three years. Punch is built around that daily record.
Owners who have read our guides to California's daily overtime or South Africa's BCEA will recognise the shape. The Philippines is a daily-threshold country with a thick layer of calendar premiums on top. Everything below turns on the exact hours each person worked, on which day, and at what time of night. Here is how it works for a small crew.
The Normal Day Is Eight Hours
Book III of the Labor Code (Presidential Decree 442) sets the frame. Article 83 says the normal hours of work of any employee shall not exceed eight hours a day. There is no weekly overtime trigger in the statute. A crew member who works five 8-hour days and a sixth 8-hour day has 48 hours in the week and zero overtime. A crew member who works four 10-hour days has 40 hours and 8 hours of overtime.
Article 84 defines hours worked as all time an employee is required to be on duty or at a prescribed workplace, and all time they are suffered or permitted to work. Rest periods of short duration during working hours count as hours worked. Article 85 requires at least 60 minutes time off for regular meals, which is why the meal break is normally unpaid and sits outside the eight.
Article 88 closes the door most small owners reach for: undertime on one day may not be offset by overtime on another. A crew member who leaves two hours early on Monday and stays two hours late on Tuesday is owed two hours of overtime pay for Tuesday, and the Monday shortfall is handled separately. Averaging across the week is not allowed.
Overtime: Regular Wage Plus 25%, or Plus 30%
Article 87 sets two rates.
On an ordinary working day, work beyond eight hours is paid at the regular wage plus at least 25%. The hourly rate is the daily rate divided by eight, so an overtime hour is 1.25 times that.
On a holiday or rest day, work beyond eight hours is paid at the rate for the first eight hours of that day plus at least 30%. Because the first eight hours on those days already carry a premium, the overtime rate compounds on top of it.
Run the arithmetic on the Metro Manila floor. Wage Order No. NCR-28, published 11 September 2026 and effective 26 September 2026, sets the non-agriculture minimum at ₱755 a day, and ₱718 for agriculture, for retail and service establishments with 15 or fewer workers, and for manufacturers with fewer than ten. At ₱755, the hourly rate is ₱94.38. An ordinary overtime hour is ₱117.97. A 10-hour day on an ordinary Tuesday is ₱755 plus ₱235.94, or ₱990.94. A 10-hour day on that worker's rest day starts at ₱981.50 for the first eight hours (₱755 × 1.30), and each hour past eight is ₱122.69 × 1.30, or ₱159.49.
Which of those two days it was is a question your time record has to answer, and the answer is worth ₱150 a day per person.
Night Shift Differential: 10% Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Article 86 gives every covered employee a night shift differential of not less than 10% of the regular wage for each hour of work performed between ten o'clock in the evening and six o'clock in the morning. It applies to the hours in that window, not to the whole shift, and it stacks on whatever rate the hour already carries. An overtime hour at 11 p.m. is paid at 1.25 times the hourly rate, then 10% more.
This is where a start time and a finish time written on a whiteboard stop being enough. A security crew that punches in at 6 p.m. and out at 3 a.m. has worked nine hours, one of them overtime, five of them inside the night window. Each of those facts changes the pay, and each one is read straight off the punch times.
Rest Days, Special Days, and Regular Holidays
Article 91 requires a rest period of not less than 24 consecutive hours after every six consecutive normal work days. Under Article 93, an employee made or permitted to work on that scheduled rest day is owed an additional 30% of the regular wage for the first eight hours. Work on a special non-working day carries the same 30%, so the day pays 130% of the basic wage, and the Department of Labor and Employment's holiday advisories put a special day that falls on the worker's rest day at 150%.
Article 94 covers regular holidays. Every covered worker is paid the regular daily wage on a regular holiday whether or not they work, except in retail and service establishments regularly employing fewer than ten workers. A worker who does work on a regular holiday is owed twice the regular rate, and DOLE's advisories put a regular holiday worked on the worker's rest day at 200% × 130%, or 260%, for the first eight hours. Overtime on a regular holiday is the hourly holiday rate plus 30%.
Punch does not track the Philippine holiday calendar or apply a rest-day rate on its own. Those premiums are set by the owner at payroll, from the per-day hours Punch records. What Punch guarantees is that the hours for that rest day, that special day, and that regular holiday are on the record, split from the ordinary days, with the exact start and finish times that decide whether any of them crossed 10 p.m.
Who Is Covered, and the Field Personnel Question
Article 82 applies these rules to employees in all establishments, but not to government employees, managerial employees, members of the employer's family dependent on them for support, domestic helpers, workers paid by results, and field personnel. The Code defines field personnel as non-agricultural employees who regularly perform their duties away from the principal place of business and whose actual hours of work in the field cannot be determined with reasonable certainty.
That second clause is the one that matters for a crew that works on job sites. A construction, landscaping, or installation worker who is away from the office all day is not field personnel just because they are outside. The test is whether their hours can be determined. An owner who knows when each person started, stopped for lunch, and finished at each site has hours that can be determined, and should expect overtime, night shift differential, and holiday rules to apply. The classification is a legal question that turns on the facts of each job, and the most consequential fact is the hours record.
Article 95 adds a yearly service incentive leave of five days with pay for every employee who has rendered at least one year of service, with an exemption for establishments regularly employing fewer than ten. And under Presidential Decree 851, rank-and-file employees are owed a 13th month pay of at least one twelfth of the basic salary earned in the calendar year, paid by 24 December. Overtime pay, premium pay, night shift differential, and holiday pay are not part of basic salary for that computation, which means the payroll has to keep them on separate lines all year.
The Daily Time Record and the Three-Year Rule
Book III, Rule X of the Omnibus Rules Implementing the Labor Code sets the paperwork.
Section 6, Payrolls. Every employer must pay through a payroll that shows, for each employee, the length of time paid, the rate of pay, the amount due for regular work, the amount due for overtime work, the deductions made, and the amount actually paid, with the employee's signature or thumbmark.
Section 7, Time records. Every employer must keep an individual time record of all employees, with a daily entry, using a clock card that records arrival and departure, a timekeeper who records each employee's time in and out, or a daily time record form each employee fills out.
Section 12, Preservation of records. All employment records must be preserved for at least three years from the date of the last entry.
A DOLE labor inspector exercising the visitorial power under Article 128 can ask for all three. So can a money claim filed by a former crew member. A group chat, a foreman's notebook, and a reconstructed spreadsheet do not meet Section 7. A record of when each person punched in, punched out for lunch, punched back in, and punched out, kept per day and per person for three years, does.
How Punch Handles Philippine Hours
Punch is built for the record each of these rules depends on.
A Philippines preset. Choose the Philippines at signup and Punch applies its Philippines Labor Code preset with pesos throughout: an 8-hour normal day, and every hour past eight on a day split out at 1.25x for the pay period you run. There is no weekly trigger, exactly as the statute reads. Rest-day, special-day, and holiday premiums are calendar-based, so the preset leaves those to you, and a crew that needs a different line switches to Custom in Org Settings.
The daily time record Section 7 describes. Your team punches in, punches out for lunch, punches back in, and punches out from their phone. Each shift carries its punch times to the minute. The day's hours, the 60-minute meal break, and whether any of it ran past 10 p.m. are on the record without anyone filling out a form.
No averaging across days. Because Punch counts overtime per day, a short Monday never hides a long Tuesday. Article 88 is enforced by the arithmetic.
A job-site geofence, not a camera. Punch-in can be limited to a geofence around the site, so a punch from the jeepney stop down the road does not count. There is no photo at punch and no facial recognition. Your crew's privacy stays intact, and the owner still has hours that can be determined with certainty.
Approvals before pay day. Managers approve hours one by one or bulk approve a whole pay period, then export to QuickBooks Online, Square, or a QuickBooks or Excel CSV for your payroll provider. The regular line, the overtime line, and the hours that need a night, rest-day, or holiday premium come from a record that was settled first.
Three years, kept. Approved pay periods stay in Punch, per person, with every punch behind them. When an inspector asks for the time record, it is a report, not a reconstruction.
No signal, no gap. Punches made in a basement, on a provincial site, or on a rooftop with no coverage sync when the phone reconnects. A shared iPad in kiosk mode, with a PIN for each worker, covers a shop floor or a warehouse gate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is overtime computed in the Philippines?
Under Article 87 of the Labor Code, work beyond eight hours on an ordinary day is paid at the regular hourly wage plus at least 25%. On a rest day or holiday, work beyond eight hours is paid at that day's first-eight-hours rate plus at least 30%. The hourly rate is the daily rate divided by eight.
Is there weekly overtime in the Philippines?
No. The Labor Code's overtime trigger is eight hours in a day. There is no 40-hour or 48-hour weekly threshold. A six-day week of 8-hour days carries no overtime; a four-day week of 10-hour days carries eight hours of it.
What is the night shift differential?
At least 10% of the regular wage for each hour worked between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., under Article 86. It applies only to the hours inside that window and stacks on any overtime or holiday rate those hours already carry.
What is the minimum wage in Metro Manila in 2026?
₱755 a day for non-agriculture workers under Wage Order No. NCR-28, effective 26 September 2026. Agriculture, retail and service establishments with 15 or fewer workers, and manufacturers with fewer than ten workers are at ₱718. Other regions have their own wage orders.
How long must Philippine employers keep time records?
At least three years from the date of the last entry, under Book III, Rule X, Section 12 of the Omnibus Rules. Section 7 requires an individual daily time record for every employee, and Section 6 requires a payroll that separates regular pay from overtime pay.
Keep a Philippine Time Record That Holds Up
Philippine overtime is a set of lines drawn on each day: eight hours, 1.25x past it, 10% more between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., 30% more on a rest day or special day, double on a regular holiday, and 30% on top of each of those past eight hours. Every line is checked against the same punches, and the Omnibus Rules expect those punches to be on an individual daily record, kept for three years, with the meal break inside them.
Punch records every punch in, punch out, and lunch, applies the Philippines preset, counts overtime by the day, and exports approved hours straight to payroll. Pricing is flat per workspace, with no per-user line item, and every plan includes every feature. The 14-day free trial starts on signup, no credit card required.
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