SA Wages Pro

Setting Overtime, Sunday and Holiday Rates

4 min read — Updated September 2026

Rates Belong to the Employee

Each employee carries their own premium rates: an overtime rate, a Sunday rate, a public holiday rate and a night shift allowance percentage. Payslips use the rates on the employee, so two workers on the same farm can quite properly be paid different premiums.

Leave a rate blank and the statutory rate applies - 1.5x for overtime, 2x for a public holiday, and 2x or 1.5x for a Sunday depending on whether Sunday is one of their working days.

You Can Go Above the Minimum, Never Below

The law sets a floor, not a fixed price. If your agreement or your own practice pays better than the BCEA - say 2x for weekday overtime - enter it and it will be used.

A value below the statutory minimum is rejected outright rather than saved. That is deliberate: saving one bad number would quietly underpay every worker it applied to, on every payslip, until somebody noticed.

  • Overtime - minimum 1.5x (BCEA s10)
  • Sunday - minimum 2x, or 1.5x where Sunday is a rostered working day (BCEA s16)
  • Public holiday worked - minimum 2x (BCEA s18)
  • Night shift allowance - minimum 10% of the ordinary daily wage for farm workers (SD13)

If an old record does hold a rate below the minimum - imported from a spreadsheet, for example - the payslip uses the statutory rate instead. The worker is never paid the lower figure.

Applying a Rate in Bulk

Changing one rate on forty employees one at a time is how mistakes happen, so rates can be applied in bulk. There are two ways to choose who is affected:

  • By selected employees - tick the specific people the new rate applies to
  • By worker type - apply it to every farm worker, or every seasonal worker, in one go

A bulk update only ever touches your own employees, and the same statutory floor is checked before anything is saved. If the value is too low, nothing is updated at all - you get an error instead of a partial change.

Where the Rates Show Up

The payslip prints a Rates block showing the hourly rate and what each premium works out to in rands, and an hours block showing ordinary, overtime, Sunday and public holiday hours next to the amounts they produced.

That level of detail is not decoration. Ethical audits and the BCEA both expect a payslip to show the hours behind each premium payment, not just a single wage figure.

A Note on Higher Earners

The BCEA's working time protections - including overtime, Sunday and night work pay - apply automatically only to employees earning below the earnings threshold, which is R269,600.90 a year from 1 May 2026.

Above that, premiums become a matter of what the contract says rather than a statutory floor. For most farm and domestic payrolls this never arises, but it is worth knowing before you argue with a manager about their weekend hours.

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