Is it legal for my employer to pay me almost nothing in a slow week on commission only?

Week by week, against everything the week paid rather than against an hourly rate. The manual the Department’s own investigators work from sets the method out, and it names commissions in the list of pay methods the test survives unchanged.

Two things in the passage are doing work. It is scoped to weeks without overtime, and the divisor is compensable hours — which is not the same as the hours that produced a sale.

The Department states it with the date it took effect, so it is quoted here rather than restated. A figure that arrives attached to the document carrying it, and to that document’s own revision date, is a figure a reader can age for themselves.

Outside sales employees. The exemption sits in Section 13(a)(1) alongside the executive, administrative and professional ones, and it is worth reading closely for what it reaches: not overtime alone, but the minimum wage as well.

A rep whose selling happens mainly away from the employer’s premises may sit inside it, and the floor described above then does not reach them. That is why the question at the top cannot be answered with a flat yes.

Two things, and neither of them is how the pay is calculated. The fact sheet on this exemption states the duties test in full, and the second half of it is the one that decides most cases — where the selling customarily and regularly happens.

The same fact sheet adds that “the salary requirements of the regulation do not apply to the outside sales exemption”, which is why a commission-only arrangement with no base does not by itself put somebody outside it.

There is, under Section 7(i), and it is regularly mistaken for the one above because both involve commission. The difference is what each lifts. The Department’s fact sheet on 7(i) says so in its own title — it is an exemption from overtime — where the outside sales exemption reaches the minimum wage itself.

Its second condition is the one that gets quoted short, and the ending is the whole of it. The sentence names the weeks it applies to; cut before that clause, a rule about weeks containing overtime reads as a rule about every week.

On top, and frequently higher. A number of states set a minimum wage above the federal one, some have their own rules about when commission becomes payable, and some define exempt sales work more narrowly than the FLSA does.

Which of those applies depends on where the work was performed rather than on where the company has its head office. A state labor department is the only place that can say, and asking costs nothing.

The hours actually worked that week — all of them, including selling time, floor time, opening and closing, meetings and training, not only the hours that produced a sale.

Then everything the week paid: commission, any draw, any base, the pay date, and the arrangement as it was described at the time, with the date it started.

And where the selling actually happened — roughly how much of the week was spent selling away from the employer’s premises rather than on them. That is the fact the outside sales exemption turns on, and it is the one nobody thinks to record while it is happening.