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Payroll Manual

Assigning an Hourly Rate

Hourly Employees

The Hourly Pay Basis Code, HRY, is used for varied groups of employees paid in PayServ. All Positions are created as a Grade 600. Although all are set up with an hourly pay basis code, their PayServ employee type can be either H for hourly or E for Exceptional hourly. All must have an hourly rate of pay as their comp rate.

  • Employees whose employee type is H (Hourly) must have a time entry transaction for time worked in every pay period in order to be paid.
  • Employees whose employee type is E (Exceptional hourly) are set up with a set number of standard hours on the position page and are automatically paid double that number each pay period. For example, if the position has standard hours of 35 hours per week PayServ pays 70 in a pay period. The agency must take some action to change or stop the number of hours paid.

The positions are set up by the agency as HRY for various reasons:

  • In some cases the employee is a part-time or seasonal employees.
    • Summer interns in many agencies
    • Part time employees paid throughout the year
    • Seasonal employees in the parks or DEC
  • SUNY Students paid for work on the student payrolls
  • CUNY
    • Students paid for work
    • Any employee not deemed in a full time position
    • Some adjuncts paid on an as needed basis
    • Skilled Trade employees
  • Agencies, 01071 and 01072, the emergency payrolls, are paid using an HRY pay basis code which represents a daily rate

The Rate of pay is determined in several ways:

  • DOB approves the hourly rates for employees in the executive agencies.
  • DOB issues a Budget bulletin with the schedule of hourly rates for seasonal titles. A new bulletin is issued increasing these hourly rates each time a contract that covers the included titles is settled. Seasonal titles may be for the summer season or winter season as determined by the agency and DOB. The rates on this chart may not represent the corresponding hiring rate or any step of the title on the appropriate annual salary chart.
  • SUNY approves the hourly rates for their employees.
  • CUNY hourly employees are covered by union contracts and have salary schedules which include the hourly rates and rate spans.
  • The National Guard rates are determined by the Federal Government.

When an agency must request an hourly rate for a position, they must determine the source for the position. Hourly rates for executive agencies are determined by the DOB, hourly rates for CUNY are determined by union contracts, or internal schedules. Executive agencies must take the appropriate action to ensure that the approved rates are on the Position Data in the Approved Salary Rate field before the pay change is requested in PayServ.

If an executive agency needs to set an hourly rate for a part time employee for whom they want to represent a particular annual rate, the agency should divide the annual rate by 2088 hours. If the agency wants to represent the hiring rate of a particular grade, they would use the hiring rate off the salary chart in effect and divide it by 2088. For example, the hiring rate of a CSEA grade 006 is $28865 from the 2015 salary schedule. To determine the hourly rate, 28865/2088 = $13.82.

Note: 2088 is the standard number of hours used by OSC to determine hourly rates for employees in executive positons. 1736 is the number of hours used to determine the hourly rate for Teaching Titles.

FEE Employees

Some employees are assigned a pay basis code of FEE in PayServ. These employees are paid for each instance that they work. PayServ does not have a Daily pay basis code, therefore, these employees are actually per diem employees whose approved salary rate on the position page may reflect a daily or hourly rate.

  • The rates are approved as explained above.