Hospitals and residential-care establishments get an option the rest of this book’s workweek rule (as covered in Chapter 1) does not offer: under section 7(j) of the Act, an employer running such a facility may agree with an employee to compute overtime over a 14 consecutive-day period instead of the 7-day workweek. The option is not automatic — it exists only where the employer and the employee, or the employee’s representative, reach an agreement or understanding before the work is performed. The agreement can be oral, but an oral agreement still has to be documented: the employer must keep a special record of its terms, including the date it was entered into and how long it remains in effect.

Once the 14-day period is in place, overtime keys off two thresholds rather than one. An employee must be paid at least one and one-half times the regular rate for hours worked beyond 8 in any single workday within the period, and again for hours beyond 80 across the full 14 days — daily overtime does not wait on the 80-hour count, since it is owed whether or not the employee ever crosses 80 hours in the period. Because both thresholds can generate overtime for the same hours, the rules allow the employer to credit premium payments already made for daily overtime toward the overtime owed once the 80-hour mark is passed, rather than paying the premium twice for the same hours.

The 14-day election is meant to be a standing choice, not a lever to pull workweek by workweek. Employers are expected to adopt it with the intent to use it permanently or for a substantial period, and cannot switch back and forth between the 14-day period and the ordinary workweek to pick whichever produces the smaller overtime bill for a particular schedule. Because the 14-day period replaces the workweek for these employees, it also becomes the basis for computing their regular rate of pay (as covered in Chapter 7), governed by the same general principles that apply everywhere else in the Act.