Overtime Salary Threshold 2026: Where It Stands Now

For nearly two years, HR departments and payroll teams across the country planned around an overtime salary threshold 2026 figure that, as of May 2026, no longer applies. The Biden-era 2024 overtime rule, which would have raised the federal exempt salary threshold from $684 a week to $1,128 a week ($58,656 a year) in stages, is officially dead. The Department of Labor confirmed its formal rescission in May 2026, closing out a legal fight that had already effectively neutered the rule since a Texas federal court vacated it back in late 2024.

If your employer raised your salary in 2024 or 2025 anticipating that rule, or if you were told you'd be reclassified as exempt once your pay crossed a threshold that's now gone, this is worth understanding in detail, because the number that actually governs your rights is not the one most people spent the last two years expecting.

The timeline, briefly

The DOL finalized the 2024 rule that spring, setting a two-step increase: a jump to $844 a week in July 2024, then to $1,128 a week in January 2025, with automatic future adjustments every three years after that. Multiple employer groups sued almost immediately.

In November 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule nationwide, finding the DOL had exceeded its statutory authority by effectively using salary level to override the duties test Congress had written into the law. A second Texas ruling in a related case, Flint Avenue LLC v. Department of Labor, reinforced the outcome that December.

The Trump DOL appealed in February 2025, then later moved to withdraw the appeal, signaling it planned to revisit the rule through its own process rather than continue defending the Biden-era version in court. The Fifth Circuit formally dismissed the appeal on May 5, 2026, without ruling on the merits either way. Nine days later, the DOL made it official: the 2024 rule is rescinded.

What's actually in force right now

With the 2024 rule gone and no replacement yet finalized, the federal standard reverts to the rule set in 2019: a salary threshold of $684 a week ($35,568 a year) for the standard executive, administrative, and professional exemptions, and $107,432 a year for the highly compensated employee exemption. Those are the numbers that currently govern federal exempt status, not the higher figures many payroll systems were built around during the rule's brief life.

If your employer already raised salaries

Some employers proactively raised salaries to the higher 2024-rule thresholds to stay compliant while the rule was in effect, or in anticipation of it taking full effect. Rolling those raises back is legally permissible going forward, since the rule requiring them no longer exists, but any wages already paid at the higher rate remain owed; an employer can't retroactively claw back pay already earned.

If your salary was raised for this reason and has since been reduced, confirm the change was applied only prospectively, not to hours or pay periods that already passed.

Duties test hasn't moved at all

None of this litigation touched the duties test, only the salary number. A worker earning above $684 a week still has to actually perform executive, administrative, or professional duties to be lawfully exempt; see FLSA exemptions explained for how that test works in practice. The salary threshold fight gets the headlines, but duties-test misclassification remains the more common, and often more expensive, violation.

What comes next

The DOL's rescission announcement signaled it intends to pursue its own rulemaking process rather than leave the 2019 thresholds in place indefinitely, but as of this writing no formal new proposal has moved through the required notice-and-comment process. Any future change to the overtime salary threshold 2026 figure would need to go through that full process again, which typically takes a year or more from proposal to final rule, and would likely face its own legal challenges given the pattern of the last decade.

State thresholds are unaffected by any of this federal back-and-forth. California, New York, and Washington all maintain their own, generally higher, exempt salary floors regardless of what happens federally.

Frequently asked questions

Does this mean fewer workers are exempt now than would have been under the 2024 rule? Yes. The 2024 rule would have pushed roughly four million additional workers into overtime eligibility by raising the salary floor; with that rule gone, the lower 2019 threshold governs, meaning fewer workers automatically qualify for overtime based on salary alone.

Could a new rule bring the threshold back up? Possibly, through a fresh DOL rulemaking process, but nothing formal has been finalized as of mid-2026, and any new rule would need to survive the same type of legal challenge that killed the 2024 version.

Does my state have a different rule regardless of the federal fight? Very possibly. Check your specific state's exempt salary threshold using the exempt salary calculator, since several states run meaningfully higher than the federal floor.

Confirm which number actually applies to you

With the federal threshold reverting to $684 a week, it's worth double-checking your own exempt status against the number that's actually in force, not the higher figure that was in the news for the past two years. Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Overtime Rulemaking, SHRM coverage of the rule's dismissal.