U.S. DOL Proposes To Increase The Salary Level For FLSA-Exempt Employees

On August 30, 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) issued a proposed rule that would make the following changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations:

• Increase the FLSA regulations’ standard salary level for FLSA-exempt employees from the current level of $684 per week ($35,568 per year) to $1,059 per week ($55,068 per year).
• Increase the total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated FLSA-exempt employees from $107,432 per year to $143,988 per year.
• Automatically update these earnings thresholds every three years to keep pace with changes in worker salaries, so that employers would know when salary updates would happen and how they would be calculated.

The proposed rule would also restore overtime protections for U.S. territories, ensuring workers in those territories where the FLSA minimum wage applies have the same overtime protections as other U.S. workers.

Once the DOL’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making is published in the Federal Register, the public will have 60 days to submit comments.  We will keep readers informed as this proposed rule works its way through the approval process.