The 2024 Overtime Rule Is Officially Dead: Courts Vacated It and the DOL Restored the $35,568 Salary Threshold

The U.S. Department of Labor's 2024 overtime rule, which would have raised the salary floor for the white-collar overtime exemptions to $58,656 a year, is now legally dead. Two federal courts in Texas vacated it, the appeals were dismissed, and on May 15, 2026 the Labor Department published a technical amendment that formally restores the prior 2019 salary thresholds in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Information last verified on June 20, 2026.

The practical bottom line for employers and salaried workers is that the threshold to qualify for the executive, administrative, and professional (EAP) exemptions is back to $684 per week, or $35,568 per year, and the highly compensated employee (HCE) threshold is back to $107,432 per year. Below is what the original rule said, what the courts held, and where the law stands as of June 2026, drawn from the Federal Register and the Department of Labor's own filings.

What the 2024 rule would have done

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires overtime pay at one and a half times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek, but it exempts certain executive, administrative, and professional employees. To be exempt, a worker generally must be paid a fixed salary at or above a set level, be paid on a salary basis, and perform certain duties.

The 2024 final rule, titled "Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees," was published at 89 FR 32842 on April 26, 2024. It raised the salary level in two steps. The first step, effective July 1, 2024, lifted the standard salary level to $844 per week ($43,888 per year) and the HCE threshold to $132,964 per year.

The second step, scheduled for January 1, 2025, would have raised the standard salary level to $1,128 per week ($58,656 per year) and the HCE threshold to $151,164 per year. The rule also built in automatic updates to both figures beginning July 1, 2027, and every three years after that.

For a sense of scale, the Department itself estimated the rule would have affected millions of currently exempt workers, either by guaranteeing them overtime pay or by prompting employers to raise their salaries above the new line. Workers who track these rules often do so because of disputes over pay and treatment at work, which is also why questions about recording a boss who is harassing you tend to spike whenever overtime classification is in the news.

How the courts struck it down

The rule did not survive long. In State of Texas v. United States Department of Labor, No. 4:24-cv-499-SDJ, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, with Judge Sean D. Jordan presiding, issued an opinion on November 15, 2024 that set aside and vacated the 2024 rule on a nationwide basis.

The court's central reasoning was about statutory authority. The FLSA exempts employees working in a "bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity," language the court read as defining the exemption primarily by job duties. The court concluded that the 2024 rule's salary increases were set so high that the salary number, rather than the duties test, would effectively decide who was exempt, which it held exceeded the authority Congress gave the Department.

A second court reached the same result. In Flint Avenue, LLC v. U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, with Judge Sam Cummings presiding, vacated the rule in an order dated December 30, 2024.

The government initially appealed, but the Department later stopped defending the rule. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeals on May 5 and May 7, 2026, which made the district court vacaturs final and unappealable.

The DOL has now made it official

After the appeals were dismissed, the Department closed the loop administratively. On May 15, 2026 it published a technical amendment at 91 FR 27833, titled "Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees; Implementation of Federal Court Judgments."

That amendment does exactly what its title says. It removes the vacated 2024 regulatory text from the Code of Federal Regulations and republishes the operative 2019 regulations, so the printed rules now match the court judgments. The Department described the change as ministerial, a correction to align the CFR with orders that were already binding.

The restored 2019 levels are the numbers employers must apply today. The standard salary level for the EAP exemptions is $684 per week, which the rule describes as equivalent to $35,568 per year for a full-year worker, and the HCE total annual compensation threshold is $107,432, with at least $684 per week paid on a salary basis.

What this means for workers and employers right now

For salaried employees earning between roughly $35,568 and $58,656 a year, the most concrete effect is that the January 1, 2025 increase that would have guaranteed many of them overtime pay never took hold. Whether such a worker is entitled to overtime now depends on the 2019 salary level and on the duties they actually perform.

Salary is necessary but not sufficient for the exemption. An employer cannot make an employee exempt simply by paying $684 per week or labeling the job "manager." The employee must also meet the duties test for the relevant exemption and be paid on a salary basis, meaning a predetermined amount not subject to reduction based on quality or quantity of work.

State law can also set a higher floor. Several states, including California, New York, and Washington, use salary thresholds above the federal $35,568 figure, and where state law is more protective, it controls. Workers documenting wage or classification disputes sometimes turn to wearable recording devices at work, but recording rules vary sharply by state and by what is being recorded, so that is a separate legal question from overtime eligibility.

Workers who believe they were misclassified and denied overtime can file a complaint with the DOL's Wage and Hour Division, and the FLSA also allows private lawsuits to recover unpaid overtime. Employees who raise these issues are protected from retaliation, a protection that overlaps with broader federal whistleblower laws covering workers who report violations.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The Recording Law Editorial Team sees the overtime saga as a clean illustration of how much of modern wage law is decided not by Congress but by the interaction of agency rulemaking and federal courts. The same salary line has now moved up, been frozen, and snapped back to its 2019 level inside of about two years, with no change to the underlying statute. For workers near the threshold, that volatility is not abstract. It is the difference between being guaranteed overtime and not.

The legal core of the dispute is durable and worth understanding even now that the rule is gone. The Eastern District of Texas did not say the Department can never set a salary threshold. It said the 2024 numbers were high enough to swallow the duties test that Congress wrote into the FLSA. That reasoning will shape any future administration that wants to raise the floor, because it signals that very large salary jumps are legally vulnerable while more modest, duties-anchored adjustments are on firmer ground.

For employers, the lesson is to classify based on the law actually in force, not on a rule that is enjoined or vacated. Many companies raised salaries or reclassified staff in 2024 in anticipation of the increase, and unwinding those changes carries its own morale and legal risks. For employees, the takeaway is that the safest way to know your rights is to look at the duties you perform, your actual pay, and your state's threshold, rather than headlines about a federal number that, as of June 2026, has reverted to $35,568.