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🧾 Tool
Unpaid Hours & Wage Theft Log
The twenty minutes before you clocked in. The lunch you ate at your desk while covering the phone. The texts you answered at 9pm. Each one is small; that's the whole point of it. This logs them by the day, does the weekly overtime math, and keeps a running total of what you were not paid — on this device only, no account, nothing sent anywhere.
Minimum wage check
Minimum wage is assessed by your employer over a pay reference period (usually the month you're paid for), not week by week — this is an indication across everything you've logged, not a formal calculation. Rates change every April. Unpaid time is one of the most common ways pay quietly drops below the legal floor, because the hourly rate on your contract stays the same while the hours it's divided into go up.
Unpaid hours by workweek
Week-by-week breakdown
Week starting
Hours worked
Hours recorded
Unpaid basic
Unpaid OT
Owed (est.)
Nothing logged yet. Start with today, then work backwards while you still remember the specifics.
This is a personal record-keeping tool, not legal advice, and using it doesn't create any attorney relationship. It applies the federal 40-hour weekly overtime standard; some states require daily overtime or have other rules that are more generous, and some jobs are exempt from overtime entirely. Whether you are owed anything, and how much, depends on facts this tool can't see. The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division and your state labor agency both take complaints, and many employment lawyers assess wage cases at no cost.
Why the person with the worse records usually loses — and why that isn't you
The instinct most people have is that the employer's timeclock is the official version and their own memory is just an opinion. Under federal wage law it doesn't quite work that way. Employers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act are the ones legally required to keep accurate records of hours worked. When those records are inadequate or inaccurate, courts have held for decades that the employee can carry their burden by showing the amount of uncompensated work as a matter of just and reasonable inference — and then it falls to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise hours or to rebut the inference. Sloppy record-keeping doesn't work in the employer's favor.
What makes a personal log persuasive is that it was written down at the time, day by day, in ordinary language, including the days nothing happened. A page of round numbers reconstructed eighteen months later reads very differently from a record with 25 minutes here and 40 there, with a shift lead's name attached and a note about what was actually being done.
There's also a clock. The Fair Labor Standards Act generally allows two years to recover back wages, three if the violation was willful. Every week you don't write down is a week that eventually falls off the back end.
Does my own record count if my employer's records say something different?
Employers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act are required to keep accurate records of hours worked and wages paid. Courts have long held that where an employer's records are inaccurate or inadequate, an employee may meet their burden by producing enough evidence to show the amount of uncompensated work as a matter of just and reasonable inference, at which point the burden shifts to the employer. A contemporaneous personal log is one form that evidence can take. How it applies to your situation is a question for an employment lawyer or your state labor agency.
How is overtime calculated under federal law?
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, nonexempt workers must be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. Some states add daily overtime or other protections that are more generous than the federal floor, so check your own state's rules. This tool calculates the federal weekly standard.
How far back can unpaid wages be claimed?
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act a two-year statute of limitations generally applies to recovering back wages, extended to three years for willful violations. State laws can differ. Because the clock runs, keeping a dated log from the day something happens matters more than reconstructing it later.
How does this work for a job in the UK?
Switch the region selector to United Kingdom. UK law gives no automatic right to a higher rate for overtime, so extra hours are owed at your normal rate unless your contract promises an uplift, which you can enter. What UK law does require is that your average pay stays at or above the National Minimum or National Living Wage for your age band, and unpaid hours are one of the most common ways it drops below. The tool divides what you were actually paid by the hours you actually worked and compares that against the current rate. Time limits are also much shorter: broadly three months less one day from the last deduction, with Acas early conciliation started inside that window.