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OB

OB is the Swedish unsocial-hours premium: extra pay for work at inconvenient times such as evenings, nights, weekends and public holidays. It is set in collective agreements rather than in law, so both the hours that count and the rate differ between agreements.

Updated

  • Category

    Working time and pay

  • Also known as

    unsocial hours premium · OB-tillägg · obekväm arbetstid

  • Sources

    Collective agreements, per tradeArbetstidslagen (1982:673), which governs placement of hours but not pay

OB is short for obekväm arbetstid, inconvenient working time. The name describes when the work happens, and says nothing about the work itself. The same task earns OB on a Sunday evening and nothing on a Tuesday morning.

There is no statutory right to OB in Sweden. Where a workplace has no collective agreement the level is set by the individual employment contract, and there is no floor.

In the PAXml standard, OB is booked to the codes OB1 to OB5 and OS1 to OS5, which gives ten levels to divide across.

How Timply handles it

Timply lets you set up your own categories with their own times, weekdays and PAXml code. The default set is weekday evening from 18:00, Saturday from 14:00 and Sunday from 12:00. Every clocked hour is split across the right category and gets its own column in the time report.

Related terms

  • Collective agreement

    A collective agreement is a written agreement between an employers' organisation or employer and a trade union on pay and terms of employment. In practice it decides premium levels, overtime pay, the number of holiday days and departures from the Working Hours Act.

  • Payroll time code

    A payroll time code says what kind of time an entry represents, for example hours worked, an unsocial hours premium, overtime or a particular reason for absence. In PAXml the field is called tidkodTYPE, and the code decides how the payroll system treats the hours.

  • Overtime

    Overtime is working time beyond ordinary working time, meaning beyond the full-time measure. The Swedish Working Hours Act caps how much overtime may be taken in a year, while what it is paid is set by a collective agreement or an employment contract.

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