The federal salary threshold that determines which salaried workers must be paid overtime is $684 a week, or $35,568 a year, according to the Department of Labor’s current guidance, not the higher $1,128-a-week figure that a since-vacated 2024 rule would have required. The Labor Department formally restored the lower threshold to its regulations in May, closing out a two-year legal fight and confirming the number employers and workers should actually be using today. For workers whose employer paid them a raise to clear the higher threshold that never took effect, the correction carries real consequences for who qualifies for time-and-a-half pay.
What the Threshold Actually Is Today
According to the Department of Labor’s own current earnings-thresholds page, a salaried executive, administrative or professional employee must be paid at least $684 per week, equivalent to $35,568 a year, to qualify for exemption from federal overtime rules. Separately, an employee classified as highly compensated must earn at least $107,432 a year, including at least $684 a week paid on a salary basis, to qualify for that exemption category.
Special lower thresholds apply in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands ($455 a week) and in American Samoa ($380 a week), while the motion picture industry uses its own separate base rate. These figures are the ones currently in force under the Code of Federal Regulations, not a proposal or a future change.
Meeting the salary threshold is only one part of the exemption test. According to the Department’s fact sheet on the executive, administrative and professional exemptions, an exempt executive’s primary duty must be managing the business or a recognized department, regularly directing at least two other full-time employees, with real input into hiring and firing decisions. An exempt administrative employee’s primary duty must involve office or non-manual work tied to management or general business operations and require the exercise of discretion and independent judgment, while an exempt professional must primarily perform work requiring advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning, typically demonstrated by a specialized degree. Employers may also count nondiscretionary bonuses and commissions, paid at least annually, toward up to 10% of the $684 weekly salary level, but clearing the dollar threshold alone does not automatically make a worker exempt from overtime. Computer professionals fall under a parallel test and may instead be paid at least $27.63 an hour rather than the weekly salary rate, a distinction that can matter for an older worker moving into part-time technical consulting after an earlier retirement.
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How the Number Went Back and Forth
The $684 figure dates to 2019, during the first Trump administration. In July 2024, a Biden-administration rule raised the threshold to $844 a week, with a second increase to $1,128 a week ($58,656 annually) scheduled to take effect in January 2025. Employers never had to comply with that second increase: a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule in November 2024, and a judge in the Northern District of Texas issued a similar ruling the following month.
After the Wage and Hour Division ended its defense of the rule on appeal, the Labor Department moved to formally strike the vacated text from federal regulations and restore the 2019 language, according to reporting on the technical amendment the DOL published in the Federal Register on May 15, 2026. The agency skipped the usual notice-and-comment process, citing the courts’ rulings as good cause and warning that leaving the vacated rule sitting in the regulations risked confusing employers and workers about which threshold actually applied.
The practical effect: employers who raised salaries in 2024 to clear the higher, now-void thresholds are under no legal obligation to roll those raises back, but they are also no longer required to pay overtime to salaried workers between $684 and $1,128 a week solely because of the vacated rule.
Who This Affects on a Fixed or Near-Fixed Income
The threshold matters directly to older workers who returned to salaried supervisory or administrative jobs after an earlier retirement, sometimes called “unretiring,” since a lower salary threshold means fewer of those positions carry a legal right to overtime pay. A worker earning $40,000 a year in a qualifying administrative role, for example, can be classified exempt under the restored $684 threshold even though the same salary would have guaranteed overtime eligibility under the 2024 rule that never took effect.
The salary threshold and duties test apply only to so-called white-collar positions; they do not touch manual or “blue-collar” work. The Department’s guidance states that production, maintenance and construction employees — carpenters, electricians, mechanics, plumbers and similar tradespeople — remain entitled to overtime no matter how highly paid they are, and the same blanket protection covers police officers, firefighters, paramedics and other first responders regardless of rank. An older worker who takes a second-career job as an electrician or a part-time paramedic keeps overtime rights that a salaried administrative retiree earning the same pay may not.
State law can override the federal floor. A number of states, including California, New York and Washington, set their own overtime salary thresholds well above $684 a week, so a worker’s actual overtime rights depend on whichever threshold, state or federal, is higher in their location. Anyone unsure which number applies to their paycheck should check their state labor department alongside the federal figure rather than assume the federal minimum controls.
For households budgeting around a family member’s return to part-time or full-time work in retirement, the restored $684 threshold is the number to plan around today, not the $1,128 figure that continues to circulate in outdated articles and employer materials left over from 2024. Whether a specific paycheck ultimately carries overtime rights still comes down to the same three-part check: the dollar amount, the duties actually performed, and whichever state law sets a higher floor — a worker who confirms all three has a firmer answer than one who relies on a single remembered number.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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