Is it legal to pay me a salary and never pay overtime?
Published September 10, 2026
The short answer
Paying a salary does not, on its own, remove the overtime requirement. The Department of Labor states that “job titles do not determine exempt status” and that “in order for an exemption to apply, an employee’s specific job duties and salary must meet all the requirements of the Department’s regulations”. A fixed weekly amount is one of the tests an exemption has to pass, and the duties tests are the other.
The sentence that ends most conversations about long hours is “you are salaried”, and it is doing more work than it can carry. Under the federal rules a salary is one condition among several, and the Department of Labor’s fact sheet on the exemption says so in the paragraph most people never reach.
What follows quotes that fact sheet rather than summarizing it, because the summaries are where the conditions quietly go missing.
What does the overtime exemption actually require?
Two things at once — a way of being paid, and a kind of work. The fact sheet states them in a single sentence, and the word doing the heavy lifting is “and”.
“To qualify for exemption, employees generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and be paid on a salary basis at not less than $684 per week. Employers may use nondiscretionary bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) paid on an annual or more frequent basis, to satisfy up to 10 percent of the standard salary level. Job titles do not determine exempt status. In order for an exemption to apply, an employee’s specific job duties and salary must meet all the requirements of the Department’s regulations.”
What are the duties tests?
There is a separate one for each exemption, and each is a list where every item has to be met rather than a general impression of seniority. The executive one is the clearest example of how specific they get.
Read it against an ordinary job and the last two items are usually where it turns: directing two or more full-time employees, and having real weight in hiring and firing decisions.
“To qualify for the executive employee exemption, all of the following tests must be met: The employee must be compensated on a salary basis (as defined in the regulations) at a rate not less than $684 per week; The employee’s primary duty must be managing the enterprise, or managing a customarily recognized department or subdivision of the enterprise; The employee must customarily and regularly direct the work of at least two or more other full-time employees or their equivalent; and The employee must have the authority to hire or fire other employees, or the employee’s suggestions and recommendations as to the hiring, firing, advancement, promotion or any other change of status of other employees must be given particular weight.”
Do the figures in that fact sheet change?
The salary level has moved before and has been litigated recently, which is why the quotations above carry the fact sheet’s own revision date and the date this page was last read against it. A figure quoted with neither is a figure nobody can date.
The safe way to use it is as a pointer rather than as an answer. The Department publishes the current level on the fact sheet itself, which is linked below, and that page is the one to read rather than any copy of it.
Who decides whether an exemption applies to a particular job?
Not an employer, and not this page. Exempt status turns on what someone’s primary duty actually is week to week, and that is a question the Wage and Hour Division or an attorney settles on the facts.
Nothing here is a view about any particular job, and it is not capable of being one — the facts that decide it are exactly the facts we have never seen.
What is worth writing down in the meantime?
The hours, and the agreement they are being measured against. A salary absorbs everything, so the extra time leaves no trace in the pay at all — the pay is the same number whichever week it was.
That makes a dated record of real start and finish times the only account of the difference that exists. It also happens to be the record that answers the duties question, because what someone did each day is what the duties tests are about.
Where this is decided
U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division
Ask the Wage and Hour Division whether the hours or the deduction described are covered where the work was done. Contacting them does not require an attorney, and the division investigates complaints itself.
Contact detailsSources read for this answer
- Fact Sheet #17A: Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer & Outside Sales Employees Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division · Revised September 2019 · read September 10, 2026
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
What can be done about it
About this answer
What is written above is general information about a rule that exists. It is not written about anybody's particular job.
It does not say what any particular employer owes anyone. That turns on facts this page has never seen — the hours, the agreement, the state the work was done in — and on how somebody with the authority to decide reads them.
Rules differ from one state to the next, and they change. Every quotation above says what that document said on the date printed beside it, which is not the same as saying what it says today.
Where anything on this page and the official source disagree, the official source is the one that counts. The office named further up decides; this page only points at it.
Whichever way that goes, the thing an agency, a union or an attorney asks for first is a dated record of what actually happened, written down while it was happening.
Keep your own record of it
A salary absorbs the extra hours, so nothing on a pay stub ever shows them. The hours themselves are the only account of the difference that exists — real start, real finish, dated as they happen, set against the week that was agreed. That is what this keeps.
Start a record of the hoursFree to start, and no account until you choose to keep it. Private to you — nobody is contacted or notified.