Wage Theft Calculator

Published by The Click Lab Agency LLC. Last reviewed September 2026. Not legal advice.

Wage theft is not one thing. It is unpaid overtime, a paycheck under the minimum wage, hours worked off the clock, tips that never reached the tip jar, and “contractor” labels applied to people who are legally employees. Each of those has its own formula for what you are owed, and most of them come with a statutory penalty on top of the back pay — usually an equal amount as liquidated damages under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and in some states double or triple the unpaid wages. This calculator walks through the federal formula and layers on the state rules for California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, which between them account for a large share of the wage claims filed in the United States.

The number it produces is a starting point for a conversation with your state labor agency or an employment attorney, not a prediction of what you will collect. The methodology page shows every formula, and the worked examples below show how the pieces fit together on real pay stubs.

Run the estimate

Select your violation type, enter your hourly rate and unpaid hours, and choose your lookback period. The FLSA allows recovery for two years of violations (three years if the violation was willful). Many states allow three to six years. Use the state law enhancement to see how your jurisdiction’s multiplier affects the total.

Worked examples

These three scenarios use the same arithmetic as the calculator so you can check the tool against a case that looks like yours.

Example 1 — Unpaid overtime premium, federal law only

A warehouse worker in Ohio earns $18 an hour and worked 50 hours a week for 40 weeks. The employer paid all 50 hours at $18 straight time. The unpaid amount is the overtime premium on the 10 weekly hours over 40: 10 hours × ($18 × 0.5) = $90 a week. Over 40 weeks that is $3,600 in back wages. FLSA liquidated damages add an equal amount, so the estimate is $7,200, plus attorney fees and costs if the claim is litigated. If the 10 hours had not been paid at all, the back wages would be 10 × $27 = $270 a week and the estimate $21,600.

Example 2 — Minimum wage shortfall in California

A restaurant runner in Los Angeles was paid $14 an hour for 30 hours a week for 26 weeks. California’s state minimum wage is well above the federal $7.25 floor, and Los Angeles sets a higher city minimum on top of that. Using the state floor as the conservative figure, the shortfall is roughly $2.50 × 30 × 26 ≈ $1,950. California Labor Code §1194.2 adds liquidated damages equal to the unpaid minimum wages, taking the estimate to about $3,900. If the worker was fired and the final paycheck was late, Labor Code §203 waiting-time penalties can add up to 30 days of wages on top. The calculator’s minimum-wage option models only the federal floor, so a California worker should run the numbers against the state or city rate instead.

Example 3 — Tip theft in Massachusetts

A server’s employer kept 20% of the pooled tips for “management” over 52 weeks. The server averaged $400 a week in tips, so the amount taken was $80 a week, or $4,160 for the year. Massachusetts General Laws c.149 §150 makes treble damages mandatory with no good-faith defense: the estimate is $12,480, plus fees and interest. This is the single most worker-favorable wage statute in the country, which is why the calculator offers a separate triple-damages option.

State-by-state penalties and where to file

The federal rules set a floor. The states below add their own multipliers, longer lookback periods, and agencies that will investigate a complaint at no cost. Minimum wage rates change every January in many states and are deliberately left out of this table; check the linked agency for the current figure.

Jurisdiction	Liquidated / multiplied damages	Lookback	Additional penalties	Where to file for free
Federal (FLSA)	Equal amount (2× total) under 29 U.S.C. §216(b)	2 years; 3 if willful	Mandatory attorney fees and costs	U.S. DOL Wage and Hour Division
California	Equal amount on minimum-wage claims (Lab. Code §1194.2)	3 years; 4 under the Unfair Competition Law	§203 waiting-time penalty up to 30 days’ wages; §226 pay-stub penalties; §226.7 meal/rest premiums	Labor Commissioner (DLSE) wage claim
New York	100% liquidated damages (Labor Law §198)	6 years	9% prejudgment interest; wage-notice and wage-statement penalties	NYS Department of Labor
Illinois	5% of the underpayment for each month it remains unpaid (820 ILCS 115/14)	10 years under the Wage Payment and Collection Act	Attorney fees and costs	Illinois Department of Labor
Massachusetts	Mandatory treble damages (G.L. c.149 §150)	3 years	Attorney fees; no good-faith defense	Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division

How wage theft damages are calculated

Recovery under the FLSA has two components. Back wages are the actual unpaid amounts — overtime premiums not paid, minimum wage shortfalls, off-the-clock hours at the applicable rate. Liquidated damages are an additional amount equal to the back wages, effectively doubling your recovery, unless the employer can show both good faith and reasonable grounds for believing its pay practices were lawful. State law multipliers in some jurisdictions go further: California, New York, and Illinois provide their own penalties on top of or in place of the federal formula; Massachusetts mandates treble damages with no good-faith defense.

Attorney fees are separately recoverable under FLSA §16(b), which means employment attorneys commonly take wage theft cases on contingency even when individual damages are modest. If your per-person amount is small but the violation affected many coworkers, a collective action can aggregate claims to make the case economically viable.

What this calculator does not do

It does not model the fluctuating-workweek overtime method, regular-rate adjustments for nondiscretionary bonuses or shift differentials, state or city minimum wages above the federal floor, prejudgment interest, meal and rest break premiums, or the value of a class or collective action. It cannot tell you whether you are exempt from overtime; that turns on your actual duties and salary level, not your job title. And it assumes the employer’s good-faith defense to liquidated damages fails, which is usually but not always the case. Treat the output as an order-of-magnitude estimate.

Learn more

Where to get help

You can file a wage claim yourself, for free, with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division or your state labor agency; the table above lists the agency for each state. Gather pay stubs, schedules, time records, and any texts or emails about hours before you file. If the amount is large, the employer has retaliated, or many coworkers are affected, an employment attorney will usually take an FLSA case on contingency because the statute awards fees to a prevailing worker. If you would like The Click Lab to pass your details to an attorney in its network, the optional form below does that; it is a disclosed referral product, and our privacy policy explains exactly what is shared.

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