By Randy Estes, September 13, 2026
You work 12-hour shifts, sometimes 14 or 21 days straight. You drive hours to location, sleep in a man camp or a motel, and go weeks without seeing your family. Your check shows a day rate, a “salary,” or maybe you’re issued a 1099 – but you never time-and-a-half. Ask about overtime and someone tells you, “That’s just how the oil field works.”
That may be how the oil field works. It isn’t how the law works. Here’s what oilfield workers in Louisiana need to know about their right to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
No. There’s no such thing. The FLSA requires your employer to pay time-and-a-half for every hour over 40 in a workweek, and nothing in the law carves out oil and gas. Floorhands, derrickhands, frac and flowback hands, wireline and coiled tubing operators, pipeline inspectors, welders, solids control and MWD techs, crane operators, truck drivers – all are generally entitled to overtime. The only way out for the company is to prove a specific exemption fits your job, and that burden is on the employer, not on you.
The FLSA covers businesses with at least $500,000 in annual sales and workers whose jobs touch interstate commerce, and oilfield service companies almost always meet that test. That matters here because Louisiana has no overtime law of its own. For Louisiana workers, the FLSA is the law that guarantees overtime pay.
A day rate is legal. But it does not wipe out your overtime. If you’re paid a flat amount per day and work more than 40 hours in a week, federal law says your employer has to total your day-rate pay for the week, divide by the hours you actually worked to get your regular rate, and pay you an extra half of that rate for every hour over 40 (29 C.F.R. § 778.112).
Here’s what that looks like in real money. Say you make $400 a day and work seven 12-hour days – 84 hours. Your pay for the week is $2,800, so your regular rate is about $33.33 an hour. You’re owed another half of that, about $16.67, for each of your 44 overtime hours – roughly $733 more, for one week. Over a few hitches, that adds up fast.
High pay doesn’t change the answer. In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Helix Energy Solutions Group v. Hewitt, a case brought by a toolpusher on an offshore rig who was paid a day rate and made more than $200,000 a year. The Court said he was still owed overtime, because a day rate isn’t a salary – and the exemptions companies lean on for highly paid workers generally require one. An employer can sometimes avoid that by also guaranteeing a true weekly salary that meets strict federal rules, but a lot of oilfield employers don’t bother.
A salary by itself doesn’t make you exempt. To take away your overtime, your employer generally has to show two things: that you’re paid a guaranteed salary of at least $684 a week – the federal floor right now – and that your actual day-to-day duties fit an executive, administrative, or professional exemption. A title like “lead,” “specialist,” or “supervisor” doesn’t settle it.
And most field work doesn’t fit those exemptions in the first place. The Department of Labor’s own regulations say the white-collar exemptions don’t apply to manual laborers and other blue-collar workers who do work involving repetitive operations with their hands, physical skill, and energy – “no matter how highly paid they might be” (29 C.F.R. § 541.3(a)). If your hitch is spent rigging up, running equipment, and doing the physical work on location, a salary probably doesn’t cost you your overtime.
The oil field is one of the most common places this happens. Flowback crews, inspectors, welders, consultants, hotshot drivers – routinely handed a 1099 and told they’re not employees. But as we explained in our recent post on misclassification, the label on your paperwork doesn’t decide whether you’re owed overtime. What matters is the economic reality of the relationship: who controls the work, who supplies the equipment, whether you can really turn a profit or take a loss through your own business decisions, and whether you depend on that company for your living.
The Fifth Circuit – the federal appeals court over Louisiana – has applied that test right here in the oil patch. In Hobbs v. Petroplex Pipe & Construction (2020), it held that oilfield pipe welders were employees owed overtime, even though the company had reclassified them as contractors and they brought their own welding trucks and tens of thousands of dollars in equipment. Not every 1099 worker wins – the same court has found some highly skilled directional drillers to be true contractors – but owning your own truck or tools is not the end of the question.
Even when overtime is being paid, it’s often calculated wrong. The ones we see most:
If you were denied overtime, you can generally go back two years – three if the violation was willful (29 U.S.C. § 255). The FLSA usually adds an equal amount on top as liquidated damages, which can double what you’re owed, and it makes the employer pay your attorney’s fees if you win (29 U.S.C. § 216(b)). Oilfield crews often bring these claims together as a collective action, and it’s illegal for your employer to fire you or retaliate against you for standing up for your rights. Depending on how the company is set up, the owners or managers may be on the hook personally, too.
And even if you signed an arbitration agreement when you were hired, you may still have a claim – it might just be decided by an arbitrator instead of a judge.
Keep your own record of your hitch dates, the hours you work each day, and your drive time. Hang on to your pay stubs, day-rate sheets, per diem records, job tickets, and texts from supervisors. Don’t sign a release or “settlement” of any wage claim without talking to a lawyer first. And don’t sit on it – every week that passes can push an older week outside the two- or three-year window.
If you work the oil field and have never once seen an overtime premium on your check, it’s worth having someone look at how you’re paid. Call Estes Davis Law at (225) 336-3394 for a free, confidential consultation. Se habla español.
This article is general information about Louisiana law and is not legal advice. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome; every case depends on its own facts. For advice about your situation, please consult an attorney.
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