Editor’s note: A federal district court has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the overtime rule from taking effect December 1, 2016.
The U.S. Department of Labor will today unveil new regulations effectuating significant changes to the payment of employee overtime under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The new rule will raise the salary exemption threshold for overtime pay under the FLSA from its current rate of $23, 660 a year to $47,476 annually. Also raised under the new rule will be the total annual compensation level above which highly compensated white collar workers will be ineligible for overtime from the current $100,000 to $134,004 a year. The adjustments in the salary exemption thresholds will be the first since 2004 and only the third in the last four decades. The DOL estimates that the new rule will result in overtime eligibility for an additional 4.2 million additional workers nationwide.
The overtime salary exemption thresholds will be subject to automatic adjustment every three years, beginning on January 1, 2020, to raise the threshold to match the 40th percentile of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region. The new rule is set to go into effect on December 1, 2016.
You can view the the DOL’s overview and summary of the final rule here.