It’s a double post day for PERKS! Let’s talk about federal OVERTIME laws!
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has released a new proposed overtime rule that would raise the federal minimum exempt annual salary to $55,068 (higher than the federal minimum exempt salary proposed by the DOL under President Obama, which was blocked from implementation by a federal court injunction back in 2017) and raising the minimum exempt salary for the highly compensated employee exemption to $143,988.
According to the DOL’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), these proposed changes were derived by “increasing the standard salary level to the 35th percentile of weekly earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region (currently the South)—$1,059 per week ($55,068 annually for a full-year worker)—and increasing the highly compensated employee total annual compensation threshold to the annualized weekly earnings of the 85th percentile of full-time salaried workers nationally ($143,988).”
The proposed rule also includes an automatic review and update of these minimums every 3 years to ensure the exempt minimums and highly compensated employee annual compensation requirement are accurately reflective of then current economic conditions.
As soon as the NPRM is published in the Federal Register, there will be a 60-day public comment period. You can submit comments electronically or by mail per the instructions in the NPRM.
Note that even if the federal exempt minimums increase as proposed in the NPRM, employers will still need to comply with state overtime laws, many of which — including New York and California — already have higher exempt minimum requirements than those proposed by the DOL.