Managing Hours, Pay Rates, and Gross Wages in Payroll

This guide provides instructions on managing employees' hours, pay rates, and gross wages during payroll processing. It covers various aspects, including regular hours, time off, holiday hours, and overtime. Employees' hours are tracked and adjusted based on their time off and holiday settings, with features to edit and add hours as needed. Pay rates are linked to employee compensation records, allowing for adjustments while noting specific conditions for salary and hourly employees. Gross wages are calculated based on hours worked and pay rates, with options for manual adjustments for salaried employees. The guide also addresses payroll corrections, enabling the entry of negative amounts for various hours and pay rates to ensure accurate payroll processing.

Apr 27, 2026
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How do I manage my employees' hours, pay rates, and gross wages when running payroll?

Purpose: This guide will help you understand how to manage your employees' hours, pay rates, and gross wages on the Edit page when running payroll.

Table of Contents

Managing hours
Managing pay rates
Managing gross wages
Payroll corrections

Managing hours

If you are using Project Tracking to track hours for employees with multiple rates of pay, click here to learn more about how these hours are managed and pulled into Payroll.

Regular hours (REG)

The Regular hours (REG) wage type will display on every record for hourly and salary employees regardless if the value is zero. REG hours are automatically prorated if you choose to prorate wages for new hires, those terminated in the middle of a pay cycle, and for employees who used an unpaid time off type. If an employee has time off or holiday hours (approved or manually added), the system will adjust regular hours so that the total number of hours worked adds up to the employee’s hours per week setting on their active compensation record.

Example:

Christina usually has 80 regular hours, but because they took a total of 8 hours of paid time off (Birthday Leave), they have their regular hours adjusted to 72 → 80-(8).

For employees with a salary pay type, hours are calculated based on pay schedule settings, the Employee Hours Worked Per Week field within the Compensation table, and the number of days worked within the pay period.

((Employee's Hours Per Week)/5) x (Count of Days Worked in the Pay Period)

You can also adjust regular (REG) hours for a salaried employee. However, this will override the hours set in the Employee Hours Per Week field, and other types of hours will not automatically adjust.

For employees with an hourly pay type, approved hours are automatically pulled into payroll from BambooHR® Time & Attendance or through the Import Hours feature. If you wish to make edits, hover over the amount within the REG hours record and click to edit the amount.

Please keep in mind, imported hours will only sync with scheduled payrolls and will not pull into off-cycle payrolls.

Time off hours

Adjustments and time off requests can happen during the run payroll process. To further understand when hours will be included and how they will be reflected on the employee paystub, click here!

The employee’s approved time off hours for the current pay period are automatically pulled into the Edit page when you click Start Payroll. Approved time off hours will show up based on the time off category name in BambooHR (PTO, Sick, Vacation, etc.), and the calculated hours and rate will appear to the left.

Edit an employee's time off hours by hovering over the hour value and clicking on the text box to type the new hour amount.

Add additional time off hours to an employee record by clicking on the Add Hours dropdown menu and selecting from one of the syncing time off categories. Categories already included in the employee's time off record will not appear in the dropdown menu. Instead, make your updates to the existing record.

To remove a time off record from an employee's payroll, hover over the record and click on the X.

Please note that edits made to an employee's time off balance for accrual policies (not Flexible or Manual) during payroll will automatically adjust balances on the Time Off tab. Remember that it may take up to a day for these changes to reflect on the employee profile. To ensure time off requests go through the correct approval workflow, it is best practice to request and approve time off and then reset payroll to include it in the current payroll run.

Holiday and Worked Holiday hours

In Holiday Pay settings, you can choose if your employees will receive a number of hours for a holiday or if you'd like to award a special pay rate multiplier for employees working on the holiday (only applies to hourly employees).

Specific amount of time off:

If you choose to award a specific amount of time off, the hours will show as Holiday on the Edit page in payroll. The holiday hours will show for any employees included in the filters you set in the holiday settings (currently showing "All Employees" in the example above). Holiday hours can also be manually added to individual employees in a payroll run if the Holiday pay type is not already in use for that specific employee by clicking Add Hours (highlighted below), selecting Holiday, and then entering the number of hours.

Pay rate multiplier:

If you award a multiplied rate for those who work on the holiday, the hours will show as Worked Holiday (multipler). If you are using BambooHR Time & Attendance or if you import hours worked, the Worked Holiday hours will automatically show on the Edit page. If you do not use BambooHR Time & Attendance and have not imported hours worked, you can manually add worked holiday hours for hourly employees by clicking Add Hours (highlighted below), selecting Worked Holiday, and then entering the hours worked.

Holiday hours will appear as “Holiday” or "Worked Holiday" with the calculated hours displayed to the right. Like time off hours, the system will subtract holiday hours from the total number of regular hours worked.

If you are importing worked holiday hours, they will automatically sync to payroll all employees. Holiday hours (hours awarded to employees without them actually working on the holiday) cannot be imported; they will automatically sync to payroll if the holiday has been added via Holiday settings.

Overtime (OT) and double time (DT) hours

On the right, overtime and double time hours appear as “OT” and “DT” with the associated rate and hours calculated for any salaried, nonexempt employees. BambooHR Time & Attendance or importing hours will automatically pull OT and DT hours into payroll, or you can manually add them by clicking on the Add Hours dropdown menu. When adding overtime or double time hours, you automatically increase the employee’s gross wages (count of hours X rate).

Like the other hour types, you can hover and click on the hour's value to edit the amount. Click the X next to the record name to delete it.

Hours manually entered in payroll or added through Time & Attendance, and the Hours Importer can have up to 4 decimals. Please note that the payroll calculation uses the four decimals, but only two decimals will be displayed on the Review Page and paystub.

Managing pay rates

Pay rates automatically appear next to the hours of each wage type and are based on settings within the employee's active compensation record. Similar to editing hours, you can edit certain rates by hovering over the rate amount and clicking on the box to type.

There are a few things to keep in mind when editing rates for different wage types:

You can edit the regular hours (REG) pay rate for hourly employees.
BambooHR uses the regular (REG) pay rate for time off and holiday pay rates. Therefore, you cannot change individual time off and holiday rates.
Editing the regular (REG) pay rate for a salaried, non-exempt employee will not automatically recalculate their overtime or double time rate. However, you can manually adjust an employee’s OT and DT rates if needed.

Managing gross wages

Gross wage is the amount paid to an employee before taxes and deductions are withheld. BambooHR will calculate gross wages for each employee on the payroll based on their active compensation record as of the start date of the pay period. The Gross Wages column includes the employee’s annual pay rate for the active pay period and any overtime hours worked (Overtime and Double Time hours from Time & Attendance).

For salaried employees, gross wage is calculated using the annual pay rates and any additional overtime or double time based on what is active when starting payroll. You can edit gross wages for salaried employees by hovering over the Gross Wage box and clicking on it. You can also edit gross wages via the Hours field for Salaried and Commission Only employees.

For hourly employees, BambooHR calculates gross wage using the number of hours worked and the pay rates associated with those hours. Because of this, gross wages are not editable for your hourly employees. Gross wages will be automatically recalculated if there are any edits made to hours or pay rates for these types of employees.

If you add overtime or double time hours to the payroll for any employee, the addition will automatically increase gross wages. For example, if an employee’s wages are $2,000 and you add 10 overtime hours at $100 per hour, the Gross Wages column will be updated to show $3,000 → (2000+(10 x 100))

Payroll corrections

We understand the importance of being able to make corrections on your payroll. You can enter a negative amount for regular hourly and salary hours (REG), time off hours, holiday hours, overtime hours, and double time hours as long as all of the hours within the current pay period are greater than or equal to 0 when added together. It works the same with pay rates. You can enter negative amounts for extra pay, salary regular wages, pay rates, and gross wages as long as the total payable wage (gross wages + extra pay) for the pay period adds up to be greater than or equal to 0.

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