The Salary Threshold for Overtime Exemption

Why the number you found is probably wrong

If you have searched for the overtime salary threshold in the last couple of years, you have almost certainly been given $43,888 or $58,656. Both figures were real, both were briefly in force or scheduled, and neither applies now. They come from a 2024 rule that was struck down, and an enormous quantity of published writing has simply never been revisited since.

This is worth understanding rather than just correcting, because it tells you something about how to read anything on this subject. Employment rules change through several mechanisms — legislation, regulation, and litigation — and the third one moves fastest and gets reported least. A rule can be published, take effect, and be erased by a court within a year, and the articles written during that window stay online looking perfectly authoritative.

So before you rely on any threshold figure you find, check its date and check whether anything happened to it afterwards. That is a two-minute exercise on the Department of Labor’s own pages, and on this particular question it changes the answer entirely.

What actually happened, in order

In April 2024 the Department of Labor published a rule raising the salary threshold in two steps: to $844 a week from July 2024, and to $1,128 a week from January 2025, with automatic updates every three years after that. Employers spent much of that year preparing for it, and many raised salaries or reclassified staff in anticipation.

In November 2024 a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule nationwide, which is a stronger outcome than an injunction — it did not pause the rule, it erased it. The appeals were dismissed in May 2026, and the Department formally rescinded the rule with effect from 15 May 2026. That restored the 2019 regulations, and it also removed the automatic-update mechanism, which means the threshold no longer rises on a schedule and will only move if a future rule moves it.

The numbers actually in force

The standard threshold for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions is $684 a week, which is $35,568 a year. The highly compensated employee threshold is $107,432 a year, and that route additionally requires at least $684 a week paid on a salary basis. In the territories the figures are lower — $455 a week in Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, and $380 in American Samoa.

Those are federal floors and several states set their own, higher. California’s threshold is $70,304 a year in 2026, which is roughly double the federal figure, and it is the state figure that governs for anyone working there. New York and Washington also run above the federal number, on their own schedules. If you work in a state with its own threshold, the federal figure is essentially irrelevant to you.

What the threshold does and does not decide

This is the part that catches people, and it catches employers too. Meeting the salary threshold does not make you exempt. It is one of three tests, and all three have to be satisfied — you must be paid on a salary basis, that salary must clear the threshold, and your actual job duties must fit one of the exemption categories.

The duties test is the one that fails most often, and it fails in a specific direction: employers assume that a salary above the line plus a title with “manager” or “coordinator” in it settles the question. It does not. Somebody earning $90,000 a year on a salary, with a title suggesting seniority, can still be non-exempt and owed overtime if the work does not actually match the exemption. Salary is a floor, not a qualification.

If your employer raised your salary in 2024

A large number of employers raised salaries to clear $844 a week during 2024, or converted salaried staff to hourly ahead of the January 2025 step. When the rule was vacated, some reversed those decisions and some did not, and both were lawful.

If your pay was raised specifically to preserve an exemption and has since been cut back, that is a legitimate thing to ask about, and the answer you want is in writing. If it was raised and left in place, the salary is now simply your salary — a rule that no longer exists cannot be cited to take it away. And if you were converted to hourly and stayed there, you may now be receiving overtime you were not receiving before, which is worth checking against your pay stubs rather than assuming.

Why a threshold exists at all

It is worth knowing what the number is for, because it explains why it sits where it does and why it is fought over. The exemptions were written for people whose work is genuinely managerial or professional, on the reasoning that such people negotiate their own terms and are not the workers the overtime rules were designed to protect. The salary threshold is a rough proxy for that: below a certain level of pay, the argument that somebody is a senior professional bargaining as an equal becomes hard to sustain.

That is why the number matters so much politically and why it moves so rarely. Raise it and a large group of salaried staff become entitled to overtime overnight, which is either a correction of a longstanding underpayment or a substantial new cost, depending on who is describing it. Leave it low for long enough and it stops doing the job it was designed for, because a figure set against one era’s salaries quietly covers more people each year that wages rise. Both of those things are true at once, which is roughly why the threshold has been litigated repeatedly rather than settled.

The direction to check in

Whenever federal and state rules both apply, the one more favorable to you governs. That is the single most useful thing to know on this subject, because it means you never have to work out which layer wins — you work out what each says and take the better outcome.

In practice, that means checking your own state before doing anything else. A quarter of the workforce lives in states where the state threshold is the operative number and the federal one is a historical curiosity, and no national article can tell you which situation you are in.

What to do with all this

Find your state’s threshold and compare your annual salary to it. If you are below it, you are almost certainly non-exempt regardless of your title, and overtime is owed for hours over forty. If you are above it, the salary question is settled and the duties question is entirely open, which is where the next article in this section picks up.

This is general information about how the rules are structured, not legal advice about your situation. If you think you have been misclassified and there is real money involved, an employment lawyer or your state labor agency can tell you where you stand — most state agencies answer questions like this without any obligation to file anything.