How to use python to calculate salaries?

I'm very, very new to code and my current class is sort of hitting us with all kinds of information at once. It's making a bit difficult to latch onto certain concepts. For this particular problem, our instructor wants us to write a code to calculate employee salaries based on hours worked. Here is the prompt: "A company wants a program that will calculate the weekly paycheck for an employee based on how many hours they worked. For this company, an employee earns $20 an hour for the first 40 hours that they work. The employee earns overtime, $30 an hour, for each hour they work above 40 hours."

He also gave us an example to work with: "If an employee works 60 hours in a week, they would earn $20/hr for the first 40 hours. Then they would earn $30/hr for the 20 hours they worked overtime. Therefore, they earned: ($20/hr * 40hrs) + ($30/hr * 20 hrs) = $800 + $600 = $1400 total."

Like I said, we were given a lot of information at once. I'm trying to use an if statement to make the code, but I know very well it's not written correctly. It's filled with all kinds of syntax errors. I'm just not sure what to do.

work_hours = str(input('Enter hours worked' ))
if (work_hours <= 40)
    salary = 20 * work_hours

if (work_hours > 40)
    over_salary = 30 * (work_hours - 40)
    reg_salary = 20 * 40 + over_salary

   print(reg_salary)

Change that str to int and put colons after your if statements

work_hours = int(input('Enter hours worked: ' ))
if work_hours <= 40:
    salary = 20 * work_hours

elif work_hours > 40:
    over_salary = 30 * (work_hours - 40)
    salary = 20 * 40 + over_salary

print(salary) # If I input 60 I get 1400

You can see that I changed the line work_hours = str(input('Enter hours worked: ' )) to work_hours = int(input('Enter hours worked: ' )). By changing that line I made sure that the input would be interpreted as a number. I also put colons (:) after your if statements, which was the only SyntaxError I could find.

work_hours = int(input('Enter hours worked: ' )) # here the input should be an integer

if (work_hours <= 40): #here you miss the ': mark

salary = 20 * work_hours

if (work_hours > 40):#here you miss the ': mark

 over_salary = 30 * (work_hours - 40)
reg_salary = 20 * 40 + over_salary

print("your total salary is:",reg_salar,"$")

I have found the some small errors in your code. You missed the ':' marks for if statement and the working hours should be insert as an integer. you entered as string. there are no arithmetic operations for strings.