Unpaid Overtime: Are You Owed Time-and-a-Half?

If you are a "non-exempt" employee covered by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), your employer must pay you one and one-half times your regular rate of pay for every hour you work beyond 40 in a single workweek -- there is no cap on how many overtime hours must be paid. Coverage is broad: it applies if your employer does at least $500,000 in annual gross business, or, even for smaller employers, if you personally are "engaged in commerce" in your day-to-day work (handling out-of-state shipments, processing interstate credit-card transactions, and similar duties count).

Whether you are non-exempt depends on your actual job duties and how you are paid, not your job title or what your offer letter calls you. Being paid a salary does not automatically make you exempt from overtime -- an employee must meet both a minimum salary test and a duties test tied to specific exemption categories (covered below) before an employer can lawfully withhold overtime pay.

The governing law is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, enforced by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD). In 2024, DOL issued a rule that would have raised the salary threshold for the "white-collar" exemption in two steps, eventually to $1,128/week ($58,656/year), with a higher figure for highly compensated employees. A federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated that rule nationwide in November 2024, finding DOL had exceeded its authority by letting the salary level override the duties test. The government’s appeal sat at the Fifth Circuit until it was dismissed on May 5, 2026, after which DOL published a final rule formally rescinding the 2024 rule and restoring the prior thresholds, effective May 15, 2026. As of this writing, the operative federal thresholds are the pre-2024 figures: $684 per week ($35,568/year) for the standard white-collar exemption and $107,432 in total annual compensation for the highly compensated employee exemption. verify these figures have not been superseded by a newer DOL rulemaking before relying on them

The FLSA exempts several categories of employees from overtime entirely, provided they are paid on a salary basis at or above the current $684/week threshold and their actual job duties meet the specific test for that category: executive employees who manage the enterprise or a department and direct at least two other full-time employees, administrative employees whose primary duty involves office or non-manual work tied to management or business operations and requires independent judgment on significant matters, professional employees in learned or creative fields requiring advanced knowledge, computer employees meeting specific programming/systems-analysis duties (who can alternatively be paid at least $27.63/hour), and outside sales employees who primarily work away from the employer’s place of business making sales. verify the $27.63/hour computer-employee alternative rate has not changed

A separate, higher-earnings exemption applies to "highly compensated employees" who earn at least $107,432 annually, are paid at least $684/week on a salary basis, and regularly perform just one of the exempt duties above -- a lower bar on duties in exchange for the higher pay floor. Job title alone proves nothing: a "manager" who spends nearly all their time on the same manual tasks as the hourly staff they nominally supervise, with no real authority over hiring, firing, or scheduling, is very likely still non-exempt regardless of the title on the org chart.

Independent contractors are also outside FLSA overtime coverage entirely, but only if the classification reflects your actual working relationship rather than just a label -- a worker who is economically dependent on one company and closely directed in how the work is done can be misclassified as a contractor and still be owed overtime as a true employee.

Outcomes depend heavily on how clearly your hours can be documented and whether the employer’s exemption claim (if any) actually meets both the salary and duties tests -- a well-documented, clearly non-exempt claim with clean time records tends to resolve faster and more predictably than a dispute over whether a job genuinely meets an exemption’s duties test.

A successful claim typically recovers the shortfall in overtime pay itself for the applicable look-back period, and often an equal amount again in liquidated damages, though an employer that shows genuine good-faith reliance on legal advice can sometimes reduce or eliminate the liquidated-damages doubling.

This page can help you understand the current federal and state rules and organize your evidence, but it cannot predict how a specific claim will be decided, and the exemption and threshold rules described here were themselves unsettled for roughly 18 months (2024-2026) -- confirm nothing here has changed again before relying on it for a filing.