The Overtime Bonus screen in Lethal Company.
Screenshot by GameSkinny

Lethal Company Overtime Bonus Explained

What is the Lethal Company Overtime Bonus? Not quite free money. Here's how it works.

LC won’t help you learn its mechanics, so you’ve got to figure them out somehow. In this guide, I’ll explain what the Lethal Company Overtime Bonus is. You won’t necessarily be going out of your way to get it, but it’s worth knowing.

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How do You Get an Overtime Bonus in Lethal Company? Answered

It’s not easy looking for scrap on deserted moons to sell to a nameless company with our lives on the line. But we do it, dang it! And once in a while, we get an elusive Overtime Bonus for our time and effort.

Like much of Lethal Company, how Overtime Bonus works is a mystery. Do we get it for gathering scrap quickly, for staying on a moon for a whole profit cycle? There have been a lot of theories floating around over the past couple months, but there’s only one answer, and it’s simpler than you might expect.

One Reddit user dug through the decompiled Lethal Company game files, and stumbled across the formula LC uses to generate the Overtime Bonus. It only factors in two things:

  • How many days are left to complete the current quota.
  • How much you sold over the current quota amount.

You don’t have to stick on one moon for a whole cycle. You don’t have to do anything crazy to get an Overtime Bonus in Lethal Company. Instead, you only need to sell above the current quota to get some extra cash.

Selling items for an Overtime Bonus in Lethal Company.
Screenshot by GameSkinny

Is It Worth Aiming for an Overtime Bonus in Lethal Company?

If you’re a more hardcore Lethal Company player, you probably know the answer to this: No, it’s not worth aiming for the Overtime Bonus unless you’re in the first two or three profit cycles.

Since the profit quota only goes up, you’ll stockpile scrap between quota cycles to ensure you make the next one. The quota is raised rapidly from one cycle to the next, so you’ll eventually need the extra cushioning from scrap you saved over previous quotas. It’s a total run saver.

The only times where aiming for the Lethal Company Overtime Bonus is actually viable, is when you’re very early in a run and you need the extra cash to get tools and ship upgrades. A Teleporter is so useful, you’ll probably want to get one at the start of your second profit cycle. An Overtime Bonus can help with that.

Since the profit quota is king and the Overtime Bonus doesn’t count toward it, you don’t want to focus on getting an Overtime Bonus as you progress through a run. That scrap you might sell for the bonus would be much better used during a later quota when the company wants a few thousand credits from you, and you’ve had a particularly bad string of hauls.

With that, you know what the Lethal Company Overtime Bonus is and whether you should aim for it. It can be a welcome chunk of change, but it’s not necessarily worth going out of your way for. Check out some of our other LC guides here on GameSkinny, such as where to find all Sigurd logs and how to use the Signal Translator.


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Author
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Ashley Shankle
Ashley's been with GameSkinny since the start, and is a certified loot goblin. Has a crippling Darktide problem, 500 hours on only Ogryn (hidden level over 300). Currently playing Darktide, GTFO, RoRR, Palworld, and Immortal Life.