Incentive pay is how many hospitals and behavioral health facilities fill hard-to-staff shifts. Management announces an extra hourly amount for certain days, and the nurses who work those days earn it. The idea is simple. Paying it correctly is not. In many units that run on UKG Dimensions (formerly Kronos), a supervisor still opens every timecard at the end of the pay period, checks the date and the department, and decides by hand which incentive level applies.
This guide walks through how the calculation actually works, the rules that cause the most errors, and a worked example with real numbers you can check against your own process.
Most incentive programs use a small set of levels instead of a custom amount for every day. Throughout this guide we use these example levels:
Management publishes an incentive calendar that says which level applies on each day, for each department. Two details matter. First, the level belongs to the day, not to the person: everyone in that department who works that day earns the same level. Second, departments can differ on the same day. Medical might be at Level 2 on a Friday while behavioral is at Level 3. The calendar has to be read per department, every single time.
Some days are also marked as on-call days. That matters for roles that are paid differently from nurses, which we cover below.
This is the question behind most incentive pay errors. A night shift that starts at 7 p.m. Friday and ends at 7 a.m. Saturday touches two calendar days, and those two days can carry two different levels.
The rule we use: an overnight shift counts toward the day it starts. A Friday night shift gets Friday’s level for all of its hours, including the hours worked after midnight. Saturday’s level does not apply to any part of that shift.
Start-day attribution keeps the pay tied to the shift the nurse actually agreed to cover. If you split the shift at midnight instead, a nurse who picked up a hard-to-fill Friday night can end up earning less incentive than a colleague who worked Friday day, which works against the reason the incentive exists. Confirm the rule in your facility’s written policy, then apply it the same way to every overnight shift.
Yes. Overnight pay (often called a night differential) and the incentive level are separate pay elements. The overnight amount pays for working nights. The incentive level pays for working a day management needed covered. A nurse working an incentivized night shift earns both.
The common mistake is treating them as either-or and paying only the larger of the two. When you enter pay, the incentive level and the overnight amount should show up as two separate items for the same shift.
Not every role on the unit is paid by incentive level. Access coordinators, for example, get on-call pay on the days marked on-call, not incentive levels. If a supervisor applies the day’s level to an access coordinator’s hours, the coordinator is overpaid. If on-call pay is missed, they are underpaid. Keep the role rules written down: who earns levels, who earns on-call pay, and on which days.
Assume the incentive calendar for Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10 looks like this:
For this example only, assume an overnight rate of $3 per hour that applies to all 12 hours of a night shift. This is an illustrative number, not a standard. Your facility’s overnight rate, and which hours it covers, will be different, so use your own policy.
The entry for Dimensions reads: J.M. Fri 10/09 Night: Level 2, 12 hrs + overnight.
The common wrong answer splits the shift at midnight: 5 hours at Friday’s Level 2 ($50) plus 7 hours at Saturday’s Level 1 ($35), which is $85 of incentive instead of $120. J.M. would be underpaid by $35 on a single shift, and the error repeats on every overnight shift that crosses into a lower-level day.
Same night, different department, different level. Reading the medical row by mistake would pay B.K. $120 of incentive instead of $216.
Saturday is an on-call day and A.R. is an access coordinator, so A.R. gets on-call pay at the facility’s on-call rate and no incentive level, even though medical is at Level 1 that day.
Three people, one weekend, three different rules. Multiply that by a two-week pay period and a full staff roster, and it is easy to see why the manual review takes hours and why mistakes slip through.
Spreadsheets help, but they depend on someone typing the right level next to every shift and remembering the overnight rule every time. Whatever tool you use, a repeatable process looks like this:
Zeneth ShiftPay was built for exactly this process. You set the incentive calendar once, with levels per day per department plus on-call days. Then you add shifts by tapping Day, Night or On-call for each person in a two-week Quick Entry grid, or by uploading the Dimensions timecard export as a CSV or Excel file.
ShiftPay credits every overnight shift to the day it starts, stacks overnight pay with the incentive level, gives access coordinators on-call pay instead of levels, and flags missing clock-outs, overlapping shifts, over-length shifts and unknown employees. The output is a checklist of exactly what to enter in Dimensions for each person, such as “J.M. Fri 10/09 Night: Level 2, 12 hrs + overnight”, along with a payroll summary, a pay-code edits file for Dimensions and an audit sheet.
Timecard files and shift entries are processed in your browser and never uploaded, and Quick Entry uses initials only. You can try the live demo with sample shifts, or start a 14-day free trial with no card. Plans start at $49 per month for one supervisor.
Under start-day attribution, the whole overnight shift counts toward the day it starts. A Friday night shift earns Friday's incentive level for every hour, including the hours after midnight.
Yes. Overnight pay and the incentive level are separate pay elements, so a nurse working an incentivized night shift earns both. Paying only the larger of the two underpays the shift.
No. Access coordinators get on-call pay on the days marked on-call, not incentive levels. Applying the day's level to their hours overpays them.
Yes. Export the pay period's timecards as a CSV or Excel file, assign each shift to its start day, apply the level for that day and department, and add overnight pay on top. Zeneth ShiftPay reads that export and does these steps automatically.