An Overview of the DOL’s White-Collar Exemption Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

On September 8, 2023, a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) from the Department of Labor was published in the Federal Register titled “Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees.”  The NPRM proposes to:

1. Revise the salary test level for the white-collar exemption to be the 35^th percentile of the full-time, non-hourly earnings distribution in the South Census region ($1,059 per week or $55,058 per year based on current data).
2. Increase the total annual compensation for the highly compensated employee exemption to the 85^th percentile of full-time, non-hourly earnings distribution nationwide ($143,988 based on current data).
3. Install an automatic updating mechanism to adjust the salary test level based on the most recent quarterly data from the Current Population Survey every three years.

In our spotlight series on this topic, Edgeworth experts Drs. Steve Bronars and Deborah Foster provide an economist’s perspective on the proposed updates to the White-Collar Exemption.