Claim:

Project 2025 envisages extending the 40-hour week to a 160-hour working month. This would allow employers to avoid paying overtime by reducing an employee’s working hours later in the month if they have worked overtime at the beginning of the month.

Evaluation:

What is true

Project 2025 actually called on Congress to allow employers and employees to adopt its proposed increased overtime model, which would actually allow employers to pay their employees less overtime…

What is wrong

…but it did not explicitly say that every company should follow this model. In addition, another model was proposed, where 80 hours of work are done in two weeks, not just 160 hours in four weeks.

In August 2024, as the US presidential election approached, allegations spread online that Project 2025 – a conservative coalition Plan of a future Republican administration – aimed to reduce the frequency with which employers must pay their employees higher wages for overtime by calling for a change in the calculation of working hours (archived):

An X-post by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, which has more than 1.5 million views at the time of writing, stated: “Project 2025 would change the 40-hour workweek to a 160-hour workmonth, so your boss could get you to work overtime without overtime pay by cutting your hours later in the month.”

Similar claims also appeared on TikTok (with more than 205,000 views, archived) and in threads.

All three posts referred to page 592 of Project 2025’s playbook entitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

The third bullet point on page 592 actually talked about extending overtime “over a longer number of weeks.” It said:

Congress should give employers and employees the flexibility to calculate overtime over a larger number of weeks.

In particular, employers and employees should be able to agree on a period of two or four weeks over which overtime is calculated. This would give employees more flexibility to work more hours one week and fewer hours the next, and would not oblige the employer to pay them more for the same total number of hours worked over the whole period.

But Project 2025’s playbook did not explicitly say that employers and employees should be required to work 160 hours a month. Rather, it said Congress should give companies and their employees the flexibility to adopt such a model.

The “manual” also recommended that periods of “two or four weeks” be used to calculate overtime, rather than just a 160-hour working month.

However, since the statement was essentially correct, we rated it as “mostly accurate.”

How are overtime hours currently calculated?

At the time of this writing, overtime hours are based on a 40-hour workweek under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL):

Non-exempt employees must receive overtime pay for more than 40 hours worked per workweek (each fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours – seven consecutive 24-hour periods) at a rate of at least one and a half times the regular hourly rate. There is no limit on the number of hours employees age 16 and older may work per workweek. The FLSA does not require overtime pay for work on weekends, holidays, or regular rest days unless overtime is performed on those days.

In other words, overtime is currently counted as any work time that exceeds 40 hours in a 168-hour period (seven full consecutive days), and should be paid at least 1.5 times the normal hourly rate. For example, if an employee who is required to work overtime is paid $8 per hour within their normal 40 hours, then they should be paid at least $12 per hour (1.5 times more than $8 per hour) starting from the 41st hour of work that week.

What does Project 2025 propose for overtime?

Project 2025 proposed that companies and their employees should be able to freely distribute working hours over 14 days (336 hours) or 28 days (672 hours), instead of just seven days (168 hours). Without increasing working hours overall, this would mean working either 80 hours over 14 days or 160 hours over 28 days.

If an employee in an 80-hour establishment works 45 hours in one week and 35 hours in the following week, he or she will not receive overtime pay for the additional five hours in the first week, as the total working time amounts to two weeks.

The argument was that this would not cost the company any more money and the employee would benefit from flexible working hours during the two or four weeks. However, overtime would be charged from the 81st hour of work within the two weeks.

This model could also be applied to 160 hours of work in four weeks. For example, an employee could work 80 hours in the first week, zero hours in the second, another 80 hours in the third and zero hours in the fourth week and receive no overtime, even though they worked 80 hours in the first and third weeks. Working hours can vary more from week to week, but as long as the number of hours worked is 160 per month, the employee will not receive any overtime. Overtime only begins to accrue from the 161st hour of work in four weeks.

Snopes has covered Project 2025 extensively. In July 2024, we published an overview of the conservative plan. We wrote about his views on U.S. families and examined his plan for a military entrance exam for all U.S. high school students. Finally, we also examined his plan to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.