Is the Extra Shift Worth It?
Put in the shift hours, the rate and your tax and costs and get back what the extra shift really leaves you. A twelve-hour overtime shift at $42 an hour with a night differential grosses $822 and leaves you $431.96. That is $36 an hour for a shift that pays $63, and just over half of what it looked like.
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Is the Extra Shift Worth It?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
What it does
Someone rings on a Tuesday and asks you to pick up Saturday night. The number in your head is the overtime rate: $42 base at time and a half is $63 an hour, plus $5.50 of night differential, so twelve hours grosses $822. That is the figure the shift gets agreed on. Work down the sheet. Marginal deductions of 32%, which is what an extra shift is taxed at rather than your average rate, take it to $558.96.
Then the costs of actually going in: $95 of childcare, $18 of petrol and parking, $14 because you did not have time to make food. The shift leaves you $431.96. That is $36 an hour, on a shift that pays $63 an hour, and 52.5% of the gross. You keep about half. The point is not that overtime is a bad deal, because $432 is $432. The point is that the number people say yes to is the gross, and the number that lands is a bit over half of it, so the decision gets made against a figure that is nearly double the truth.
Anyone weighing a fourth shift against a Saturday with their family should at least be weighing the right one. Change the marginal rate to 24% and rerun the arithmetic: the shift leaves $497. Change childcare to zero because your mother is visiting and it leaves $527. The two inputs that move this most are the ones nobody puts in the conversation, and both are personal, which is exactly why a generic answer is worthless and a sheet is not.
Two things it does not know. It has no view on what the shift costs you in recovery, and the fourth shift in a week is not the same as the first even though it pays the same. And the marginal rate is entered by you rather than worked out from tax tables, on purpose: filing status, state and everything else you earn all change it, and a tool that guessed would be confidently wrong.
Ask your own payroll or read it off a payslip that already has an overtime shift on it. To make it yours, put your base rate, your differential, your real marginal rate and your own cost of going in.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Is the Extra Shift Worth It, carrying these columns:
- Marginal rate to try
with the model computed beside the data:
| Gross for the shift ($) | 822 |
| Take-home after deductions ($) | 559 |
| Cost of going in | 127 |
| What the shift actually leaves you ($) | 432 |
| Effective rate an hour | 36 |
| Share of the gross you keep | 0.5255 |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Thirty-six hours of vacancy costs $2,268 on your own staff and $3,520 through an agency. The agency only wins if your overtime multiplier reaches 2.33, and almost nobody pays that.Overtime or Agency?
- Two nurses on call cost $624 on a normal night. Across ten thousand simulated nights they average $808, and the worst reaches $3,396, which is the number the stipend line never shows.How Many Nurses on Call?
- Put in the posts, the turnover and the time to fill and get back the empty posts and cover cost to expect. A 42-post unit at 19% turnover carries about two empty posts all year and $253,000 of cover. Filling posts faster matters more than losing fewer nurses, and the tornado says so.How Many Nurses Do We Need to Hire?
- Put in the patients, the nurses rostered and how often people call off and get back the odds the shift runs short. Twenty-seven patients, six nurses, four and a half each. The sheet says the shift is fine. Ten thousand simulated nights say it runs below ratio on a third of them, and call-offs, not the census, are why.Will the Roster Hold Tonight?
- Put in the shifts each nurse works and get back who carries the weekends and nights. Eight nurses, twelve shifts each, and it still is not equal: one works five weekends and one works one. The month looks fair in total hours and is not fair in the hours anybody minds.Is the Roster Fair?
- Pay a little extra each month. How much sooner is it gone?How Much Sooner Does an Extra Payment End the Loan?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: What-if analysis in Google Sheets.