The Biden Labor Department's 2024 overtime rule raised the salary below which most salaried workers must be paid time-and-a-half, to $43,888 in July 2024 and $58,656 in January 2025. The department estimated about 4 million more lower-paid salaried workers would become eligible in the first year, plus 292,900 higher earners, NPR reported. A federal judge in Texas struck the rule down in November 2024, before Trump took office, and the higher threshold never took effect.
Trump's Labor Department did not defend it. On May 5, 2026, it filed a joint stipulation in the Fifth Circuit ending its appeal in Flint Avenue, LLC v. U.S. Department of Labor, and on May 15, 2026 it formally restored the 2019 rule's threshold of $684 a week, or $35,568 a year, according to the Federal Register. The workers the rule would have covered remain without the expanded overtime pay.
Correction (October 2, 2026): this entry said the Trump administration “killed” the rule by declining to appeal in early 2025, that it was the second time Trump had killed an overtime rule, and that the rule would have transferred $1.5 billion a year to workers; it also included claims about business lobbies and inflation that its sources did not support. A court struck the rule down in November 2024; the Trump Labor Department ended its appeal and restored the 2019 threshold in May 2026. The entry has been rewritten to that record and its severity lowered to moderate.