An operations leader running four locations doesn't need a theoretical debate about labor law. The real problem shows up on a Friday afternoon: one manager approves a shift lead's overtime without blinking, another manager at the location across town treats the same role as salaried and exempt, and nobody can say with confidence which manager is right. That's not a training gap. It's a classification gap, and it's exactly the kind of policy drift across locations that makes multi-site workforce administration so hard to keep consistent.
Getting exempt versus non-exempt classification right is the starting point for correct overtime pay. Get it wrong, and every downstream process, scheduling, approvals, payroll, inherits the error.
What exempt and non-exempt actually mean
Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), non-exempt employees must be paid overtime, generally time and a half, for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek. Exempt employees are not entitled to that overtime pay, provided they meet specific federal tests.
That "provided" is where a lot of well-intentioned employers get tripped up. Job title doesn't decide exemption status. Being paid a salary instead of an hourly wage doesn't decide it either. Two separate conditions have to be met before an employee can be legally classified as exempt from overtime.
The current salary threshold, and why it hasn't been stable
The first condition is a minimum salary threshold. As of August 2026, the operative federal threshold for the executive, administrative, and professional overtime exemptions is $684 per week, as set out in 29 CFR § 541.600 (text via Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute). An employee paid less than that on a salary basis cannot be classified as exempt under this exemption, regardless of their duties.
That figure has had a bumpy recent history, and operations leaders managing pay decisions across locations should know it. A 2024 Department of Labor rule attempted to raise the threshold in two steps, first to $844 per week in July 2024, then to $1,128 per week in January 2025. A federal court vacated that rule in November 2024, which reverted the operative threshold back down to $684 per week. That is the number in effect now. It is not necessarily the number in effect indefinitely. Thresholds set by federal rule can change again, so this is a fact worth revisiting periodically rather than filing away as permanently settled.
Salary alone doesn't finish the job
Meeting the salary threshold is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The employee's actual day-to-day duties also have to meet the specific requirements of the exemption category being claimed, commonly referred to as the duties test. An employee can clear the $684-per-week salary bar and still be non-exempt if their real job responsibilities don't meet the exemption's duties requirements.
This is where classification decisions get made on paper but break down in practice. A location manager who spends most of the week doing the same hourly tasks as the crew they supervise, with limited independent judgment or hiring/firing authority, may not satisfy the duties test even at a qualifying salary. Classification has to be evaluated against what the person actually does, not just what the offer letter says or what a manager assumes based on the role two towns over.
What misclassification actually costs
Classifying a non-exempt employee as exempt, and therefore not paying required overtime, isn't a paperwork technicality. It creates real financial exposure. Misclassified employees who should have received overtime can be owed back pay for the unpaid overtime, and the FLSA allows for liquidated damages on top of that back pay in many cases. That exposure compounds across every pay period the misclassification went uncorrected, and across every employee in the same misclassified role, which is exactly the kind of multi-location, multi-manager scenario operations leaders are trying to keep consistent in the first place.
Classification is the decision. Tracking is the safeguard.
Here's the part that operations leaders feel most directly: even a workforce that's classified correctly, with every non-exempt employee properly identified, still depends on accurate hour capture and correct overtime calculation every single pay period. Classification answers the legal question of who is owed overtime. It doesn't answer the operational question of whether the hours got recorded right, whether the overtime got flagged before payroll ran, or whether a manager three locations away approved it consistently with the manager down the hall.
That operational layer is where spreadsheets and manual timecards tend to fail, and it's exactly what Asure Time and Attendance is built to handle for hourly, non-exempt workforces. It captures hours, tracks overtime as it accrues, and routes manager approvals so exceptions get caught before a pay run rather than after it. Asure Time and Attendance is often paired with AsureCentral, giving operations leaders one connected view of schedules, hours, and approvals instead of a patchwork of location-by-location habits.
Picture that same operations leader overseeing four retail locations. A shift lead at one store works two extra hours covering a callout. Under a manual process, that overtime might get caught by one manager and missed by another, depending on who happens to notice before the timecard gets submitted. With Asure Time and Attendance, the extra hours are captured automatically, flagged as overtime, and routed for manager approval as part of the standard workflow, so the outcome doesn't depend on which manager happened to be paying attention that week.
None of this replaces the classification decision itself. Asure doesn't determine whether a role meets the FLSA duties test, and no software can promise a guaranteed compliance outcome. What Asure Time and Attendance does is remove the operational guesswork once classification is settled, so the hours and overtime calculations behind that decision are handled the same way, every pay period, at every location.
Where to start
Classification is a legal judgment that belongs with whoever owns compliance decisions in your organization, ideally revisited whenever a role's actual responsibilities change, not just when it's created. But once a role is properly classified as non-exempt, the operational work of tracking hours and calculating overtime correctly, consistently, across every location and every manager, is where Asure Time and Attendance does the work a spreadsheet can't reliably do. If overtime exposure and manager approval bottlenecks are showing up across your locations, explore Asure Time and Attendance to see how shift scheduling, overtime tracking, and manager approvals work together on one system.
