This article is general information, not legal advice. Every case is examined on its own facts, and every cause of action has its own limitation period.

On the payslip it is a single line: "global overtime, 1,200 ILS", the same figure every month. The same figure in the month you stayed until ten at night to finish a stocktake, and in the month you left at four every day. That line is usually all an employee still holds when the question comes up of whether the overtime was ever paid, and a second question follows it: who has to prove how many hours were worked.

Who is meant to count the hours

The Hours of Work and Rest Law puts the counting on the employer. An accurate record is required for every employee: when they arrived, when they finished, and how long the break lasted. That is a statutory duty, not an internal habit a small team can drop. An employer who kept no such record is in breach of the law, and that failure also changes the starting point in the Labour Court when a dispute over overtime arises.

A payslip does a different job. It records payment, so a line carrying a fixed global sum can be correct as bookkeeping and still say nothing about how many hours were worked that month. With no hours record beside it, the payslip is evidence of what was paid rather than of what was done.

With no record, who has to prove it

This question reaches our firm in almost every enquiry of this kind: there is no time clock, so is there no case? Where the employer kept none of the records the law requires, the burden does not rest on the employee alone. The employee has to give a reasonable and consistent account of their working hours, and from there it falls to the employer to show that the account is wrong, rather than the employee proving each hour separately. That reverses the ordinary rule, under which the party making a claim carries the burden of proving it.

Consistency is measured against whatever can be cross-checked with it. An account that says "I worked a huge amount" has nothing to anchor it. An account that says the team stayed on Thursdays until ten to close up, and that messages went round the work group at that hour, is already being tested against material. The answer that comes back from the other side is usually that the employee stayed of their own accord and that nobody asked them to, and that answer is tested against the same material: who sent the message at ten at night, and who replied to it.

The first question in a case like this is who was supposed to keep the record, and only after that what the record says.

In other circumstances the picture turns over. Where the employer did run a time clock and the employee says the report failed to reflect what happened, the burden returns to the employee to explain why the record is wrong, and that usually rests on the evidence of someone still working there.

What has already served as evidence of hours

The Labour Court has accepted as evidence of working hours WhatsApp messages with a manager around arrival and departure times, shift rosters the employer handed out, entry logs for the workplace from a security system or a staff card, evidence from colleagues, and a personal log kept in real time rather than written up once the claim had been filed.

Each of them carries different weight. A time stamped on an outgoing email, 21:47, was created with no thought of a claim, which makes it hard to attack. A log filled in after the fact weakens the moment the employer asks when exactly it was written. A colleague still employed there gives evidence facing the person who pays their salary, and that shapes what they are willing to put in writing. A shift roster never updated after swaps is still a document the employer produced, which makes it hard for the employer to argue there is nothing in it.

When a global overtime figure holds

A global overtime arrangement is a permissible arrangement, and writing it on the payslip does not by itself make it valid. What moves the answer is two matters of fact: whether the sum reasonably approximates the overtime the employee actually works, and whether the employee agreed to the arrangement knowingly. An arrangement the employer set alone, which appeared on the payslip without that agreement, is examined differently. A sum that stays at 1,200 ILS in a month of forty overtime hours tells its own story. In other circumstances, where the sum was set in a signed employment contract, revised when the scope of the role changed, and topped up separately in the busy months, the arrangement looks altogether different. A payslip showing a fixed monthly sum with no connection to the hours worked does not necessarily release the employer from paying what is owed.

Three payslips, and what they show together

Our firm usually starts with three consecutive payslips and the busiest month of the year alongside them. If the global line is identical across all three, the next question is what happened in that busy month and where it was kept. The cases that clear up quickly are those where both the payslips and an outside source showing hours exist, a work roster or an exchange with the manager. Without them the enquiry begins from two versions of memory, and the question of who was obliged to keep a record, and did not, comes back to the centre. Every cause of action in employment law has limitation periods of its own, so the question of which month the count starts from is a legal question in its own right. A first assessment rests on the payslips and on what was kept beside those months, not on what anyone remembers of them.