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Exempt Salary Thresholds: Comparing Federal FLSA and State Standards

No expert reviewer assigned to this entry. General information, not legal advice.

Calling someone a "salaried manager" doesn't make them exempt from overtime. Two tests decide that question, and one of them is a hard dollar line that moves every year in several states. Get the salary wrong by a dollar and the exemption fails — quietly, on every paycheck, until someone looks back and adds up the unpaid overtime.

The two tests

  1. The salary level test. The employee must be paid a guaranteed salary at or above the legal floor for the state where they work. The salary can't dip with hours or workload.
  2. The duties test. The person's real, day-to-day work must be mainly executive, administrative, or professional work, as the regulations define those terms. Job titles don't count. Actual work does.

Fail either test and the employee is non-exempt. That means time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a week, and claims can reach back years.

The 2026 numbers

The federal FLSA sets a national baseline salary level. The states below set their own, much higher floors, and if your employee works in one of them, the state number is the one you have to beat.

  • Washington: $80,168.40 a year ($1,541.70 a week) from January 1, 2026. That's 2.25 times the state minimum wage, and it's the same for every employer, big or small. The Washington exempt salary threshold is scheduled to get steeper: the multiplier reaches 2.5 times the minimum wage in 2028.
  • California: $70,304 a year from January 1, 2026. The formula is plain — twice the state minimum wage ($16.90 an hour) for a full-time year. The California exempt salary threshold rises automatically whenever the minimum wage does.
  • New York: $66,300 a year ($1,275 a week) in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties, and $62,353.20 a year ($1,199.10 a week) in the rest of the state, from January 1, 2026. The threshold is 75 times the local minimum wage. Two catches: the state salary test covers executive and administrative employees only — there's no separate salary threshold for professionals — and the downstate/upstate split catches employers who use one number for the whole state.
  • Colorado: $57,784 a year ($1,111.23 a week) from January 1, 2026, under the COMPS Order. Colorado applies its own duties tests on top of the salary line.

Why these numbers keep moving

Three of these four states tie the threshold to the minimum wage by formula: 2 times in California, 2.25 times (soon 2.5) in Washington, 75 times the hourly wage in New York. Every minimum wage increase drags the exempt salary line up with it. A salary that cleared the bar in 2025 can fail in 2026 without you changing anything at all.

What to do

  1. List every employee you've classified as exempt, and the state each one works in.
  2. Compare each salary with that state's 2026 floor — not last year's figure, and not the federal one.
  3. Audit the duties honestly. If your "manager" spends most shifts running a register, stocking shelves, or covering a route, the exemption is shaky no matter what they earn.
  4. For anyone under the line, pick one: raise the salary to clear it, or reclassify them as non-exempt and start tracking hours and paying overtime.
  5. Put a January review on the calendar. These thresholds reset with the new minimum wages, and January is when employers get caught.

Mistakes that turn into back-pay bills

  • Paying a California supervisor $65,000 a year. That's under the $70,304 line, so they're non-exempt — and every unpaid overtime hour is owed, potentially for years back.
  • Using one national salary band. A $60,000 salary clears Colorado's threshold. It fails in California, New York, and Washington.
  • Assuming small employers get a break. Washington charges the same $80,168.40 threshold to a three-person shop as to a company with thousands of employees.
  • Trusting the business card. "Operations manager" printed on a card is not a duties test. If the work is routine and supervised, the exemption won't hold up.

Quick questions

Is the salary test judged week by week or year by year? Week by week. New York, Washington, and Colorado all publish weekly figures, and a strong annual total doesn't rescue a week that fell below the line.

My exempt employee works in two states. Which floor applies? The floor of each state where they work. If both states set thresholds, plan around the higher one so you're covered either way.

Where can I compare all the thresholds in one place? The exempt salary threshold comparison lines the states up side by side, and our Free Employer Compliance Checker applies the right floor to your states and headcount.