Unpaid Wage Differences and Overtime Claims in Argentina

If your employer pays less than the wage scale set by your collective bargaining agreement, pays overtime without the legal 50% or 100% premium, or classifies you under a lower pay category than the work you actually perform, you have a wage difference. You can claim it while you're still on the job — the law protects that credit even if you signed your pay stub without objection. You can recover the last 24 months, since each unpaid amount carries its own two-year deadline.

What Are Wage Differences and Unpaid Overtime?

A wage difference is the gap between what your employer paid you and what the law or your applicable collective bargaining agreement (CBA) guarantees. It shows up in three typical ways: you're paid under a CBA that doesn't match your actual duties, with a lower base salary; you're classified under a pay category below the work you actually perform, within the same CBA; or you're paid for hours worked beyond the legal workday without the 50% or 100% premium the law requires.

Article 260 of the Employment Contract Law (LCT) is what makes this claim possible: if your employer paid you less than what was owed, that debt survives even if you received the payment without raising any objection at the time. Wage credits are non-waivable — signing your pay stub "in agreement" does not extinguish them (Article 12, LCT).

How Is the Overtime Premium Calculated?

Argentina's legal workday is 8 hours, or 48 hours per week (Ley 11.544, Article 195 LCT). Any hour worked beyond that limit is overtime and must be paid with a premium on top of your ordinary hourly rate (Article 201, LCT):

• 50% premium: on business days, Monday through Saturday until 1:00 p.m.
• 100% premium: Saturdays after 1:00 p.m., Sundays, and national holidays.

To calculate the hourly rate, take your best ordinary monthly salary and divide it by 200 (or by whatever divisor your CBA sets, if different). That hourly value is then increased by 50% or 100%, depending on the day and time you worked the extra hours.

No one is required to work overtime. Article 203 LCT only obligates you to work it in cases of imminent danger to people or property, or accidents that have already occurred — never as a matter of routine workload. Refusing overtime outside those cases is not grounds for discipline.

Hours bank: the exception introduced by Ley 27.802. Since March 2026, Ley 27.802 allows you and your employer to agree in writing to compensate overtime with time off instead of pay — the "hours bank," Article 197 bis LCT — within a maximum of 90 calendar days. It's an option, not something your employer can impose: it requires a written, voluntary agreement, either individual or through your union, with a verifiable tracking method. If you never signed such an agreement and your CBA doesn't provide for one, the hours bank does not apply to you, and your overtime is still owed in cash, with the 50% or 100% premium.

How Do You Prove You Worked Overtime?

The burden of proving overtime falls, in principle, on you. But you don't need video of every shift — reasonable evidence that makes the claim credible is enough.

• Pay stubs: compare the "overtime" line item against the hours you actually worked.
• Time clocks and access logs: biometric systems, key cards, building entry records.
• Witnesses: coworkers who can testify to your actual schedule in court — up to five per side in a labor case.
• Messages and email: WhatsApp messages, emails, or task instructions sent outside your normal schedule.
• Your own records: a personal log or spreadsheet with dates and clock-in/clock-out times, if you kept it contemporaneously.

The law gives you an important advantage: if your employer doesn't keep or doesn't produce the time records required by Article 52 LCT, its silence counts against it (Article 57 LCT), and courts generally presume the schedule you allege is accurate, as long as it's reasonable. Ley 27.802 reinforced this logic: it now requires auditable digital clock-in and clock-out records, and any missing or irregular record keeps generating a presumption in your favor.

Incorrect Union Classification: When You're Paid Under the Wrong CBA

Many employers avoid paying CBA-mandated wage supplements by labeling employees "off-scale" (fuera de convenio) or by classifying them under a collective bargaining agreement with lower pay than the one that actually matches their work. It's common in warehouses and logistics (Comercio instead of Camioneros), in food service, in call centers, and in private security.

What determines the applicable CBA isn't your job title or what your contract says, but the work you actually perform — this is the doctrine of primacy of reality. If your duties match the core activity of a different agreement with a higher salary scale, you can request reclassification and recover retroactively the difference between what you were paid and what you were owed.

The same applies within a single CBA when you're assigned a pay category lower than your actual duties call for: the claim is calculated the same way, comparing the base pay for your real category against what you were actually paid.

Step by Step: How to Claim Wage Differences and Overtime

If you're still working for the company

You can claim without resigning or waiting to be dismissed. The first step is a certified demand — a free labor telegram or a notarized letter — detailing your start date, your actual pay category, and the amount claimed broken down item by item, month by month, with the total for each difference or batch of overtime hours. A generic demand with no figures doesn't work as evidence and doesn't suspend anything.

Before filing a lawsuit, you must exhaust mandatory conciliation before SECLO. You can claim the differences and keep working: you don't need to treat yourself as constructively dismissed to collect a wage credit that has already accrued.

If you've already left the company

When you review your final settlement, check whether it still carries the same differences you'd been experiencing. You can claim them together with any severance owed, in the same proceeding.

The deadline: two years, month by month

Wage credits prescribe two years from when each one became due (Article 256 LCT) — there isn't a single deadline running from when you left the job. Each month of underpaid wages or unpaid overtime has its own expiration date; that's why the longer you wait, the more months you lose, even though the rest of the claim stays alive.

Sending a free labor telegram or opening a case before SECLO doesn't interrupt that deadline: it suspends it for six months. That's an important distinction — suspension pauses the clock and picks up where it left off; interruption, by contrast, resets it to zero. Neither happens unless you actually put the claim in writing.

Common Mistakes When Claiming Wage Differences

• Believing that signing your pay stub "in agreement" closes the claim. It doesn't: Article 260 LCT protects the credit even if you collected it without objecting. The real mistake isn't signing — it's never leaving any written record of disagreement, because without a formal demand, there's nothing to suspend the statute of limitations or start building the evidence for the claim.
• Waiting "to avoid conflict." Every month that passes without a claim is a month closer to the two-year deadline. Waiting doesn't kill the whole claim at once, but it does chip away at the oldest months.
• Claiming in bulk, without itemizing. A claim that just says "I'm owed overtime," with no detail on which months, how many hours, and at what premium, is weak. Each difference has to be itemized, month by month and line by line.
• Confusing partial off-the-books pay with unregistered employment. These are different claims, under different rules — mixing them in your demand weakens both.

Frequently Asked Questions