Chapter 1 introduced the regular rate as the figure that section 7's overtime premium is built from. This section goes deeper on a fact that shapes everything else in this chapter: the regular rate is not simply “the pay rate” an employer and employee happen to agree on — it is, by definition, an hourly rate. The regulation states this plainly: the regular rate under the Act is a rate per hour. That holds no matter how the employee is actually paid. The Act does not require an employer to compensate on an hourly basis at all; earnings may be set by the piece, by salary, by commission, or by some other measure entirely. What the Act requires is that, whatever basis is used, the employer translate it into an hourly figure before computing the overtime owed.

That translation is not optional, and it cannot be defined away by contract. The regular rate “cannot be left to a declaration by the parties as to what is to be treated as the regular rate.” Courts have described it as an “actual fact” — the hourly rate actually paid for the normal, nonovertime workweek the employee worked — not a label attached to the paycheck. Once the employer and employee have settled on the amount of wages and the mode of payment, working out the regular rate becomes, in the regulation's own words, “a matter of mathematical computation.” It is the employee's total remuneration for the workweek (apart from the statutory exclusions covered later in this chapter), divided by the total number of hours the employee actually worked that same workweek. There is one bounded exception to that divisor: where an employee is paid a fixed weekly salary understood to compensate a specific number of hours, § 778.113(a) divides the salary by the number of hours the salary is intended to compensate rather than by the hours actually worked that week — a $350 salary understood to cover a 35-hour week yields a $10 regular rate, $350 divided by 35. A wage contract that tries to name a different “regular rate” does not change either result.

The same principle runs through the minimum wage side of the Act, not just overtime: section 6, as covered in Chapter 1, sets the wage floor as a rate stated per hour, and coverage does not depend on paying employees by the hour — a worker paid on a piecework, salary, commission, or other basis is just as covered, and must still receive at least the equivalent of the minimum hourly rate once that pay is worked out on an hourly basis. That is why the sections ahead walk through each common pay method in turn: piece rates, salaries, commissions, and the rest each start from a different number, but every one of them runs through the same basic division — total remuneration over hours actually worked, or, in the bounded salary-for-a-fixed-schedule case described above, over the hours the salary is intended to compensate — to arrive at the one hourly figure the Act actually measures.