The much-protested, court-suspended Obama administration rule on overtime pay won’t be bothering you anytime soon. That’s because the Labor Department (DOL) decided in late July to issue a request for information on what a revised rule should be. Comments are due Sept. 25, but there’s no deadline for DOL to reach any decisions regarding the data it collects. Thus, it could be quite a while before the department issues a new rule.
Current regulations say that if you pay someone more than $455 per week, in many cases you can regard that person as being an executive, administrative, or professional employee and thus exempt from overtime pay. That salary amount hadn’t changed for years. So in 2016, DOL said it planned to nearly double the threshold, to $913 per week, and have it rise automatically from then on in response to the inflation rate.
The rule was supposed to take effect last Dec. 1, but a federal appeals court judge stopped DOL from implementing the rule. It has been in legal limbo since. Now, with the Trump administration in place, DOL has told the court it won’t defend the $913-per-week threshold. Its request for information will seek comments on what the right compensation level should be.
