What the FLSA Defines: Minimum Wage, Overtime, and Child Labor

The Fair Labor Standards Act defines three core workplace protections under federal law: a minimum wage, overtime pay for hours beyond 40 in a workweek, and limits on child labor. It also sets rules for who counts as a covered employee, what records employers must keep, and how the Department of Labor enforces the whole scheme.¹ The Wage and Hour Division inside the Department of Labor investigates violations and recovers back wages for workers who have been underpaid.

The Federal Minimum Wage

The FLSA sets the federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour for covered, non-exempt employees.² That rate has held since July 2009.

Coverage reaches employers two ways. Enterprise coverage applies to businesses with at least two employees and annual gross sales of $500,000 or more, along with hospitals, schools, and government agencies regardless of revenue.³ Individual coverage protects any worker whose duties directly involve interstate commerce, such as handling goods that cross state lines or regularly communicating with customers in other states.

Where a state or local minimum wage is higher than $7.25, the employer must pay the higher rate.⁴ The federal floor matters most in states that match it or have not set a higher one of their own.

Tipped Employees

A tipped employee under the FLSA is one who regularly receives more than $30 per month in tips.⁵ The employer may pay a direct cash wage as low as $2.13 per hour and claim a tip credit for the rest, but only if the cash wage plus tips actually reaches $7.25 for every hour worked in the week. If tips fall short, the employer must make up the difference. The employer must tell the employee about the tip credit in advance, and workers must keep all of their tips unless they participate in a valid tip pool with other regularly tipped coworkers.

Subminimum Wages for Workers with Disabilities

Section 14(c) allows employers to pay less than $7.25 to workers whose disabilities directly reduce their productivity on the specific job being performed, but only after obtaining a special certificate from the Wage and Hour Division. The rate must be proportional to the worker’s actual productivity compared with non-disabled workers doing the same type of work. Having a disability alone does not justify a lower wage; the disability must measurably affect output on that job.⁶

Overtime Pay

Non-exempt employees who work more than 40 hours in a workweek must be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for the excess hours.⁷ A workweek is a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours, or seven consecutive 24-hour periods.⁸ The employer picks the starting day and time, and it need not match a calendar week. Overtime is triggered only by the total hours inside that seven-day window. Federal law does not require extra pay just because work falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday.

The Regular Rate

The regular rate used to calculate overtime is not always the same as the stated hourly wage. It takes in all pay for the week: hourly wages, non-discretionary bonuses, commissions, and shift differentials. Certain payments are excluded, including discretionary gifts, expense reimbursements, and premium pay that the employer voluntarily provides above any legal requirement. Leaving a non-discretionary bonus or commission out of the regular rate produces underpaid overtime, one of the most common violations the Wage and Hour Division finds.

What Counts as Hours Worked

The FLSA requires pay for all time the employer suffers or permits the employee to work, and that reaches beyond the obvious. Travel between job sites during the workday counts; the ordinary commute from home to a fixed workplace does not. A one-day special assignment in another city counts as work time, minus the normal commute. Waiting time depends on the setup: a worker who must stay ready is engaged to wait and must be paid, while one who is free to use the time personally is waiting to be engaged and generally is not.⁹

Training and meetings count as work time unless all four of these are true: attendance is voluntary, the event is outside normal hours, the content is not directly related to the job, and the employee does no other work during the session. Miss any one, and the time is paid.

Child Labor Rules

The FLSA bars oppressive child labor, meaning the employment of minors in jobs or under conditions that federal law treats as harmful.¹⁰ The rules are organized by age and apply to non-agricultural work; agriculture has its own separate standards.

Under 14: generally cannot be employed, with narrow exceptions for a family-owned business, acting, and newspaper delivery.
Ages 14 and 15: may work in non-hazardous jobs such as retail, food service, and office work, only outside school hours and within strict daily and weekly limits.
Ages 16 and 17: may work unlimited hours in any job the Secretary of Labor has not declared hazardous.
Age 18 and older: no longer subject to the FLSA’s child labor rules.

¹¹

Hour Limits for 14- and 15-Year-Olds

When school is in session, 14- and 15-year-olds may work no more than 3 hours on a school day and no more than 18 hours in a school week. When school is out, those caps rise to 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week. Work must fall between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., except from June 1 through Labor Day, when the evening cutoff moves to 9:00 p.m.¹²

Hazardous Occupations

Workers under 18 are barred from jobs the Secretary of Labor has declared hazardous. These include mining, working with explosives, operating many types of power-driven machinery, roofing, and excavation. The Secretary issues specific Hazardous Occupations Orders identifying each prohibited task.¹¹

Penalties

Civil penalties for child labor violations adjust annually for inflation. As of the January 2025 adjustment, the maximum amounts are up to $16,035 per child employed in violation of the law, up to $72,876 per violation that causes the death or serious injury of a worker under 18, and up to $145,752 per willful or repeated violation that causes death or serious injury.¹³

Who Is Covered and Who Is Exempt

Not every worker receives the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime protections. The law carves out exemptions for several categories, most familiarly the white-collar exemptions for executive, administrative, and professional employees.¹⁴ To qualify, an employee generally must meet both a salary test and a duties test.

Salary Threshold

After a federal court vacated the Department of Labor’s 2024 update to the salary rules, the Wage and Hour Division is enforcing the 2019 threshold: a minimum salary of $684 per week, about $35,568 per year. The higher threshold for highly compensated employees is $107,432 per year in total annual compensation.¹⁵ Any salaried worker earning less than $684 per week is generally non-exempt and entitled to overtime, regardless of job duties.

Duties Tests

Clearing the salary threshold alone does not make a worker exempt. The employee’s primary duty must fit one of the recognized categories. An executive employee’s main duty is managing the business or a recognized department, and they regularly direct the work of at least two full-time employees. An administrative employee primarily performs office or non-manual work directly related to business operations and regularly exercises independent judgment on significant matters. A professional employee’s work requires advanced knowledge in a specialized field, typically acquired through extended education, or requires invention, imagination, or talent in a recognized creative field.¹⁶ Outside sales employees and certain computer professionals qualify under separate criteria. A worker who does not clearly meet both the salary and duties requirements should generally be treated as non-exempt.

Employee or Independent Contractor

The FLSA covers employees, not independent contractors. The Department of Labor applies an economic reality test that weighs the totality of the working relationship. Six factors guide the analysis: the worker’s opportunity for profit or loss based on their own decisions, the nature of investments by the worker and the hiring entity, the permanence of the relationship, the degree of control the hiring entity exercises, whether the work is central to the hiring entity’s business, and whether the worker uses specialized skills showing business-like initiative.¹⁷ No single factor decides it. A worker who is economically dependent on the hiring entity is likely an employee entitled to FLSA protections; someone truly in business for themselves is more likely a contractor.

Employer Recordkeeping and Postings

The FLSA reaches past pay itself. Every covered employer must keep detailed payroll records for each employee, including full name, home address, date of birth if under 19, hours worked each day and week, regular hourly rate, straight-time and overtime earnings, deductions, and total wages paid each period. Payroll records must be kept for at least three years, and basic time records such as daily start and stop times for at least two.¹⁸

Employers must display the official FLSA minimum wage poster in a visible spot at every worksite. The Department of Labor provides the poster at no cost, and the most recent version, revised April 2023, is the one that satisfies the requirement.¹⁹

Break Time for Nursing Employees

Under provisions added by the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, most employers must provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for up to one year after the child’s birth. The employer must also provide a private space, not a bathroom, shielded from view and free from intrusion by coworkers or the public. For employees who telework, that means being free from observation through any employer-provided camera or video conferencing platform during pumping breaks.²⁰

Enforcement and Filing a Complaint

The Wage and Hour Division enforces the FLSA through workplace investigations by field staff around the country. An investigation can start from an employee’s complaint or on the agency’s own initiative. When violations are found, the Department of Labor or the employee may recover unpaid back wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages. An employee who files a private lawsuit can also recover attorney’s fees and court costs.¹

A two-year statute of limitations generally applies to the recovery of back wages. If the violation was willful, meaning the employer knew or showed reckless disregard for whether its conduct violated the law, the lookback period stretches to three years.²¹

You can reach the Wage and Hour Division at 1-866-487-9243 or by visiting a local WHD office. There is no fee to file a complaint, and the Division investigates regardless of a worker’s immigration status.²²

1
U.S. Department of Labor. Handy Reference Guide to the Fair Labor Standards Act
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 206 – Minimum Wage
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #14 – Coverage Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
4
U.S. Department of Labor. Wages and the Fair Labor Standards Act
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 203 – Definitions
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #39 – The Employment of Workers with Disabilities at Subminimum Wages
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 207 – Maximum Hours
8
eCFR. 29 CFR 778.105 – Determining the Workweek
9
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #22 – Hours Worked Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 212 – Child Labor Provisions
11
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #43 – Child Labor Provisions of the FLSA for Nonagricultural Occupations
12
U.S. Department of Labor. Non-Agricultural Jobs – 14-15
13
U.S. Department of Labor. Civil Money Penalty Inflation Adjustments
14
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 213 – Exemptions
15
U.S. Department of Labor. Earnings Thresholds for the Executive, Administrative, and Professional Exemption
16
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 541 – Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer and Outside Sales Employees
17
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 795 – Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
18
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 516 – Records to Be Kept by Employers
19
U.S. Department of Labor. Fair Labor Standards Act Minimum Wage Poster
20
U.S. Department of Labor. FLSA Protections for Employees to Pump Breast Milk at Work
21
U.S. Department of Labor. Back Pay
22
U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a Complaint