Minnesota Overtime Laws for Salaried Employees: Exemptions and Claims

If you’re paid a salary in Minnesota, you’re still owed overtime unless your job clears two separate hurdles: a minimum salary level and a specific set of job duties. Minnesota overtime laws for salaried employees follow the federal Fair Labor Standards Act for most workplaces, layered with a state overtime rule that reaches some smaller employers the federal law doesn’t. A job title on your offer letter has no legal weight. What matters is what you actually earn and what you actually do.

Which Overtime Threshold Applies to You

Two laws are in play. The federal FLSA requires time-and-a-half for every hour past 40 in a workweek.¹ Minnesota’s statute sets the threshold at 48 hours instead.²

Most Minnesota employers are covered by the FLSA because they have at least $500,000 in annual revenue or their employees engage in interstate commerce. When both laws apply, the more protective one controls, so the 40-hour federal rule governs almost every workplace. The 48-hour state rule mainly matters at smaller businesses that fall outside FLSA coverage.

A few groups sit outside Minnesota’s overtime requirement entirely: auto dealership salespeople, parts workers, and mechanics paid on commission or incentive, and employees of air carriers covered by the Railway Labor Act.² Health care employers can use an alternative 14-day, 80-hour work period if the employee agrees in advance.

The Salary Floor: You Have to Earn at Least $684 a Week

Before an exemption can even be considered, you have to be paid at least $684 per week, which comes to $35,568 a year.³ Earn less than that on salary, and you’re non-exempt. You’re entitled to overtime regardless of your title, your duties, or whether your employer thinks otherwise. The Department of Labor tried to raise this floor in 2024, but a federal court in Texas struck the rule down, and the $684 figure remains the enforcement number in 2026.

You also have to be paid on a “salary basis,” meaning a fixed, predetermined amount each pay period that doesn’t move up or down with the hours you put in or how much you produced.⁴ If you do any work in a given week, you get your full weekly salary.

Employers can dock salary in narrow situations: full-day personal absences, full-day sick leave under a bona fide plan, unpaid FMLA leave, full-day disciplinary suspensions for serious workplace conduct violations, and penalties for major safety-rule infractions.⁴ Shaving pay because you left early one afternoon, or because business was slow, is not on that list. If your employer routinely makes those kinds of deductions, the exemption they’re claiming for you may not hold, and back overtime could be owed.

The Duties Tests

Clearing the salary floor is only half the analysis. Your actual work has to fit one of the recognized exemption categories. Minnesota’s own rules (Minnesota Rules 5200.0180 through 5200.0210) largely track the federal categories.⁵ Titles don’t decide anything. Calling someone a “manager” doesn’t make them one for FLSA purposes.⁶

Executive

Your primary duty must be managing the business or a recognized department. You must regularly direct at least two full-time employees (or the part-time equivalent), and you must have genuine authority over hiring and firing, or at minimum have your recommendations on those decisions carry real weight.⁷ A shift lead who hands out assignments but has no voice in personnel decisions usually falls short.

Administrative

Office or non-manual work directly related to management or general business operations, involving discretion and independent judgment on significant matters.⁸ Think human resources, finance, compliance, or marketing strategy — functions that run the business rather than produce what it sells. This is the exemption employers most often misapply. Processing invoices all day isn’t independent judgment on matters of significance, no matter how large the dollar amounts.

Learned or Creative Professional

The learned professional exemption covers work that requires advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning, is predominantly intellectual, and rests on a prolonged course of specialized instruction. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and teachers typically qualify.⁹ A separate creative professional exemption applies to work in recognized artistic fields that requires invention, imagination, or originality.

Computer Employee

Systems analysts, programmers, and software engineers whose primary duty is designing, developing, testing, or analyzing computer systems or programs against system or user specifications can be exempt. The computer exemption uses an alternative pay test: either the $684 weekly salary or an hourly rate of at least $27.63.¹⁰ IT support workers who troubleshoot hardware or run pre-built reports usually don’t meet the duty test.

Highly Compensated Employee

An employee earning at least $107,432 in total annual compensation (including at least $684 per week on a salary basis) can be exempt under a relaxed duties test. Instead of satisfying every element of another exemption, the employee only needs to customarily perform at least one duty from the executive, administrative, or professional categories.³

How Overtime Gets Calculated When You’re Salaried but Non-Exempt

If you’re salaried and don’t fit an exemption, your employer still owes overtime. The starting point is the regular rate: your weekly salary divided by the number of hours the salary is meant to cover.¹

An $800 weekly salary for a 40-hour week works out to a $20 regular rate. Work 45 hours, and you’re owed five hours at $30 (time-and-a-half), for total weekly pay of $950. If the salary is meant to cover a longer week, the math shifts. A $900 salary covering 45 hours produces a regular rate of $20, but the straight-time salary already covers all 45 hours, so the overtime premium is only half the regular rate — an extra $10 an hour for the five hours over 40. Total: still $950.

Nondiscretionary bonuses (production targets, attendance, sales goals) have to be folded back into the regular rate for the weeks they cover, which pushes the overtime premium up. A truly discretionary bonus, like an unexpected holiday gift, doesn’t count.

What Counts as Hours Worked

Overtime disputes often turn on which hours got counted in the first place. Federal rules cover several categories employers regularly miss.

Training, meetings, and lectures count as work time unless all four of these are true: attendance is voluntary, the event falls outside normal working hours, it’s not directly related to your job, and you perform no other work during it.¹¹ A mandatory lunch-hour training is work time.

Travel between job sites during the workday is compensable. Your normal home-to-work commute is not. A one-day out-of-town assignment counts as work time for the portion of the travel that exceeds your normal commute. Overnight travel counts as work time when it falls within your normal working hours, even on a day you wouldn’t normally work.¹¹

Pre-shift and post-shift tasks like starting up specialized equipment or completing required paperwork are compensable when a contract, custom, or established practice treats them as part of the job.¹² Fifteen minutes of expected early setup, five days a week, is more than an hour that should be counting toward overtime.

How Long You Have to File

Deadlines are short. Under the FLSA, you have two years from the date of each violation to file a claim, or three years if the violation was willful — meaning the employer knew or showed reckless disregard for whether it was breaking the law.¹³

Minnesota’s clock runs the same way: two years generally, three years if the failure to pay was willful or if the employer failed to submit payroll records when the Department of Labor and Industry requested them.¹⁴ Each unpaid paycheck starts its own clock, so older violations may drop off while newer ones stay recoverable.

How to File a Wage Claim and What You Can Recover

Before contacting an agency, pull your documentation. Pay stubs, offer letters, employment contracts, and your own records of hours worked all matter. If your employer keeps timekeeping records and you think they’re wrong, your own contemporaneous notes — a calendar, a daily log, texts about late nights — carry real evidentiary weight. Claims that fall apart usually fall apart because the worker has only a general recollection of working “a lot.”

Minnesota wage claims go through the Department of Labor and Industry’s Labor Standards division. You can start by calling 651-284-5075 or emailing the division. An investigator follows up within two business days to complete an intake covering your employer’s information, your pay rates, the dates and hours at issue, and what you estimate you’re owed.¹⁵ After the claim is assigned, the investigator sends the employer formal notice requiring a response within 10 days and works to resolve the dispute. The commissioner can also fine employers up to $10,000 for failing to produce payroll records.¹⁶

You can also file with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, or bring a private lawsuit. The private-lawsuit route often makes financial sense when the amounts are meaningful, because the FLSA allows liquidated damages equal to the unpaid wages (effectively doubling the recovery) plus attorney’s fees. A court can reduce or eliminate liquidated damages only if the employer proves it acted in good faith and had reasonable grounds to believe it was in compliance.¹⁷ Employers who simply misread the duties test rarely clear that bar.

Retaliation for filing a claim is separately illegal. The FLSA bars termination, demotion, schedule cuts, or any other punishment for asserting overtime rights, and allows recovery of lost wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages.¹⁸ Minnesota’s whistleblower statute independently protects employees who report suspected violations of state or federal law in good faith.¹⁹

1
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 23 – Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA
2
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 177.25 – Overtime
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Earnings Thresholds for the Executive, Administrative, and Professional Exemption
4
eCFR. 29 CFR 541.602 – Salary Basis
5
Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. Minimum Wage, Overtime Exemptions
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 17A – Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer and Outside Sales Employees Under the FLSA
7
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 541 Subpart B – Executive Employees
8
eCFR. 29 CFR Part 541 – Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer and Outside Sales Employees
9
eCFR. 29 CFR 541.301 – Learned Professionals
10
eCFR. 29 CFR 541.400 – General Rule for Computer Employees
11
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 22 – Hours Worked Under the FLSA
12
eCFR. 29 CFR 790.5 – Effect of Portal-to-Portal Act on Determination of Hours Worked
13
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 255 – Statute of Limitations
14
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 541.07 – Two-Year Limitations
15
Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. Wage Claim
16
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 177.27 – Powers and Duties of Commissioner
17
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 260 – Liquidated Damages
18
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 77A – Prohibiting Retaliation Under the FLSA
19
Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 181.932 – Disclosure of Information by Employees