A standard 14-and-7 rotation puts a hand on location 84 hours a week — 44 of them FLSA overtime, every working week. At oilfield wages of $25–$40/hour, hourly crews generate $40,000–$70,000 in annual time-and-a-half wages, which means the premium third blows straight past the $12,500 deduction cap ($25,000 joint). Oilfield workers are among the few Americans for whom the full cap is routinely in play.
The industry wrinkle is pay structure. Hourly W-2 hands with overtime on their stubs have the clean case. Day-rate workers are murkier: a string of federal rulings (most famously the Supreme Court's Helix decision) established that day rates generally don't satisfy the FLSA's salary rules, meaning many day-rate hands were legally owed overtime. But the deduction covers overtime premium actually paid as wages — if your operator paid a flat day rate with no overtime line, there's no qualified amount on your W-2 to deduct until that pay is corrected.
Bonuses complicate upward: safety bonuses, completion bonuses, and per-well incentives are typically nondiscretionary, belong in the regular rate, and increase the premium owed and deductible. With numbers this size, the difference between a naive estimate and a correct one is real money — and at high oilfield household incomes, the $150,000/$300,000 phase-out needs checking too.