Overtime
Extra pay for flying beyond the hours guaranteed in your contract, always capped by the legal flight time limits.
Definition
Overtime in cabin crew pay is money earned for duty or flying hours above a contractual threshold — typically a monthly guarantee or a planned block-hour target. It is paid at your normal or an enhanced hourly rate depending on the contract, and it sits inside, never above, the regulator's flight time limitations. In the United States the equivalent is often called premium pay or trip pick-up pay when crew take open flying above their line.
What it means for you
Overtime is the lever that turns an average month into a good one, but the ceiling is set by law: EASA rules cap you at 100 block hours in any 28 consecutive days and 900 in a calendar year, so no airline can pay you to fly past that. The trade-off is fatigue — heavy-overtime months are the ones where crew report the most sickness and the least recovery.
In practice
An easyJet crew member picking up extra sectors through the August peak pushes close to the 100-hour rolling limit, then finds crew control cannot roster her for the last days of the month because the hours are simply not there.
Go deeper
Related terms
4 terms- Block hoursRoster & schedulingTime from the aircraft first moving under its own power to the parking brake being set: the unit airlines pay by and regulators cap.
- FTLRegulationFlight time limitations — a regulator's legal caps on duty, flight hours and minimum rest: the only hard limit on what a roster can ask.
- Flying payPay & benefitsThe variable part of crew pay, calculated per block or flight hour actually flown; the reason long-haul months pay more than short-haul.
- Sector payPay & benefitsPay earned per flight flown rather than per hour — the model most European low-cost carriers use on top of a small basic.