Louisiana Overtime Laws: Rates, Hours Counted & Claims

Louisiana overtime law is entirely federal. The state has no overtime statute of its own, so the Fair Labor Standards Act controls: if you are non-exempt, your employer must pay at least 1.5 times your regular rate for every hour you work beyond 40 in a workweek.¹ Eligibility, pay math, exemptions, deadlines, and penalties all come from that one federal framework.

No State Overtime Statute Backs You Up

Most states layer their own wage-and-hour rules on top of federal law. Louisiana does not. The legislature has never passed a general overtime law, and the state has no minimum wage either. If a job somehow falls outside FLSA coverage, no Louisiana statute fills the gap. In practice that gap is narrow, because the FLSA reaches essentially any business with $500,000 or more in annual revenue and any employee involved in interstate commerce.

One small carve-out exists for certain municipal employees who can take compensatory time off instead of overtime pay, but that statute applies to a specific slice of the public sector and defers to the FLSA anyway.² For nearly everyone else in the state, the FLSA is the whole of the law.

Who Is Entitled to Overtime

Every employee starts as non-exempt. An employer who wants to treat you as exempt has to prove you meet both a salary test and a duties test for one of the FLSA’s recognized exemption categories.³ Meeting only one of those tests isn’t enough.

The salary threshold for most white-collar exemptions is $684 per week, or $35,568 per year. The Department of Labor tried to raise that figure in 2024, but a federal court in Texas vacated the new rule, and the $684 level remains in effect. If you earn less than that on a salary basis, you’re almost certainly owed overtime no matter what your job title says. A separate “highly compensated employee” test applies once total earnings reach $107,432 a year, with a lighter duties analysis at that level.⁴

The Exemption Categories

Clearing the salary threshold still isn’t enough on its own. Your actual daily work has to fit one of these categories:

Executive: primary duty is managing the business or a recognized department, regularly directing at least two full-time employees, with real authority over hiring and firing.³
Administrative: primarily office or non-manual work related to business operations or management policies, involving independent judgment on significant matters.
Learned professional: advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning, typically from a prolonged course of specialized instruction. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers are the classic examples.
Outside sales: primary duty is making sales or obtaining contracts, regularly away from the employer’s place of business. The salary threshold doesn’t apply here.
Computer professional: systems analysts, programmers, software engineers, and similar roles, paid either the standard salary or at least $27.63 per hour.⁵

Job titles carry no weight in this analysis. Employers sometimes label workers “manager” or “administrator” to sidestep overtime even when the real work involves almost no independent authority. If your title says one thing and your daily tasks say another, the tasks win. Misclassification is one of the most common sources of overtime disputes.

How Overtime Pay Is Calculated

Overtime is calculated from your “regular rate,” which is not always the same as your hourly wage. It includes your base pay plus most other compensation tied to your work: shift differentials, non-discretionary bonuses, and commissions all get folded in. Truly discretionary bonuses and reimbursements for business expenses are left out.⁶

For a standard hourly worker, add up all eligible compensation for the week, divide by total hours worked, and multiply the overtime hours by 1.5 times that figure.¹

Multiple Pay Rates in One Week

If you work at different hourly rates during the same workweek, the regular rate is a weighted average. Add total earnings across all rates, divide by total hours, and apply the 1.5 multiplier to the blended figure.⁷ For example, 25 hours at $15 plus 20 hours at $20 gives ($375 + $400) ÷ 45 = $17.22 per hour, so the five overtime hours pay $25.83 each.

Piece Rate and Commission Workers

The same logic applies to piece-rate and commission pay. Total weekly earnings divided by total hours produces the regular rate. Because straight-time pay for the overtime hours is already inside that total, the employee is owed an additional half-time premium on each overtime hour rather than the full time-and-a-half.

Which Hours Actually Count

Many overtime disputes turn less on the rate than on which hours count. The FLSA’s definition of “hours worked” reaches beyond time at a workstation.

On-Call and Waiting Time

Federal regulations draw a line between being “engaged to wait” and “waiting to be engaged.” If your employer requires you to stay on the premises or so close that you can’t use the time for yourself, that waiting time is paid work time. If you only have to leave a phone number and are otherwise free, it generally isn’t.⁸ The test is how much freedom you actually have while you wait.

Travel Time

Your regular home-to-work commute doesn’t count. Travel during the workday does, including driving between job sites. A one-day assignment in another city is compensable travel, minus your normal commute. For overnight travel, time spent traveling during your normal working hours counts even on non-working days, while travel as a passenger outside those hours generally doesn’t.⁹

Training and Meetings

Training and meetings count as work time unless all four of these are true: attendance is outside normal hours, voluntary, unrelated to the job, and no productive work is performed. Fail any one and the time is compensable.⁹

What You Can Recover

The baseline remedy is back pay for all unpaid overtime, plus an equal amount in liquidated damages. That effectively doubles what you’re owed.¹⁰ Liquidated damages aren’t a bonus tacked on for bad behavior; they’re the statutory default. An employer avoids or reduces them only by convincing a court that the violation was made in good faith with reasonable grounds for believing the conduct was lawful.¹¹ “I didn’t know” is not the same standard as “I had reasonable grounds to believe I was complying,” and courts treat it that way.

A private lawsuit also gets you reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs on top of the back pay and liquidated damages.¹⁰ The fee-shifting provision is why many employment lawyers will take overtime cases on contingency, which lowers the financial risk of bringing a claim.

Separately, the Department of Labor can impose civil money penalties of up to $2,515 per violation for willful or repeated infractions, adjusted annually for inflation.¹² Those penalties go to the government, not the worker, but they signal how seriously an investigation may proceed.

Employers are required to keep detailed payroll records for at least three years, including hours worked each workday and workweek.¹³ If your employer can’t produce accurate records, courts tend to credit reasonable employee estimates of hours worked, so keeping your own log helps.

You Can’t Be Punished for Complaining

The FLSA prohibits firing, demoting, cutting hours, or otherwise retaliating against an employee for filing an overtime complaint or cooperating with an investigation. The protection covers complaints to the DOL and complaints made internally to your employer, and it applies even if you turn out to be wrong about whether you were owed overtime. Good-faith complaints are protected either way.¹⁴

Remedies for retaliation include reinstatement, back pay for lost wages, and liquidated damages equal to the lost wages.¹⁴ Retaliation claims carry the same deadlines as wage claims: two years, extended to three for willful violations.

How to File an Overtime Claim in Louisiana

You have two options, and they aren’t mutually exclusive, though a DOL enforcement action can terminate your individual right to sue on the same wages.

Complaint to the Department of Labor

The Wage and Hour Division handles FLSA complaints. Call 1-866-487-9243 or file online. Complaints are confidential; the DOL does not disclose the complainant’s name or even confirm that a complaint exists.¹⁵ The nearest field office will contact you, and an investigation may follow. If the WHD finds a violation, you receive a check for the back wages owed.¹⁶

Private Lawsuit

You can also sue directly in federal or state court and pursue back pay, liquidated damages, and attorney’s fees.¹⁰

Deadlines

The statute of limitations is two years from the date of each unpaid overtime violation, and three years if the violation was willful.¹⁷ Each shortchanged paycheck starts its own clock, so waiting shrinks the recoverable back pay week by week. Acting quickly preserves the full amount.

1
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 778 – Overtime Compensation
2
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Revised Statutes 33:2213.1 – Compensatory Time
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 17A – Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer and Outside Sales Employees Under the FLSA
4
U.S. Department of Labor. Earnings Thresholds for the Executive, Administrative, and Professional Exemption
5
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 17E – Exemption for Employees in Computer-Related Occupations Under the FLSA
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 23 – Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA
7
eCFR. 29 CFR 778.115 – Employees Working at Two or More Rates
8
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 785 – Hours Worked
9
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the FLSA
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 216 – Penalties
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 260 – Liquidated Damages
12
U.S. Department of Labor. Civil Money Penalty Inflation Adjustments
13
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 516 – Records to Be Kept by Employers
14
U.S. Department of Labor. Field Assistance Bulletin 2022-02 – Protecting Workers from Retaliation
15
U.S. Department of Labor. How to File a Complaint
16
Worker.gov. Filing a Complaint With the WHD
17
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations