Are associate attorneys exempt from overtime?

The federal answer sits in one short provision.

Under 29 CFR 541.304, the Department of Labor's regulation for lawyers and physicians, an employee who holds a valid license to practice law and is actually engaged in the practice is an exempt professional — and the salary requirements do not apply.

The Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 17D says the same thing in the same breath: the salary and salary-basis requirements do not apply to bona fide practitioners of law.

Two conditions do all the work, and neither is about pay.

The first is a valid license to practice law.

The second is actual engagement in practice.

Whatever an associate earns, the federal rule attaches no salary floor and no salary-basis paperwork to a practicing lawyer's classification — the exemption runs on the license and the work, not on compensation.

The title on the business card adds nothing either way: the Department of Labor says job titles do not determine exemption status, so the actual duties and pay decide, and for this provision the duty that counts is the practice of law itself.

Keep the provision's boundary in view: it covers lawyers.

Paralegals, legal secretaries and firm administrators run their own duties and salary tests, and the analysis for each role is its own — our guide to staff classification works through them role by role.

And the rule above is the federal one.

States with their own wage-hour laws write their own exemption tests, and California's reaches practicing lawyers with a salary condition the federal rule does not have — that state layer is the last section of this page.

The exemption responds to practice, not to a law license alone, and that is where contract staffing gets firms into trouble.

A contract attorney you staff on document review holds a valid license — but whether the work is the practice of law is its own question, and on that question the exemption can fail.

The two conditions of 29 CFR 541.304 have to hold at the same time; a license does not carry the classification by itself.

Our guide to staffing document review covers the role itself.

A 2015 Second Circuit case, Lola v.

Skadden, Arps, frames the risk: a contract document reviewer exercising no legal judgment may not be 'practicing law' for the FLSA exemption.

The details of that opinion sit outside this page's sources, so treat the case as a flag rather than a settled rule — document review is not automatically exempt work, and whether a reviewer's tasks involve legal judgment is a fact-specific question to put to employment counsel with the actual work in front of them.

Employee-or-contractor is a separate question from exempt-or-not, and the federal rulebook for it is in flux: on February 26, 2026, the Department of Labor proposed rescinding its 2024 independent-contractor rule, which it says it is no longer applying in investigations.

A 1099 arrangement, in other words, does not settle the overtime question on its own — the classification still has to be made out.

Whether you staff the review directly or through legal staffing agencies — our guide to hiring contract attorneys covers that route — the practical steps are the same: write down what the reviewers actually do, and have employment counsel review the classification before you treat the role as exempt.

The lawyer exemption does not reach unlicensed people, no matter how lawyer-like the work looks.

Because 29 CFR 541.304 covers only a holder of a valid license who is actually practicing, a law graduate awaiting bar results is not exempt under it — and neither is an unlicensed law clerk.

Waiting on results is not holding a license.

Your firm has two routes with such a hire: fit the person under another exemption's salary and duties tests, or pay overtime.

Our guide to hiring bar applicants takes the employer side of that hire — the title before admission, the pay structure, and the offer contingent on passing.

The first route has a number attached.

29 CFR 541.600 sets the standard salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions at $684 per week — and as of October 2, 2026, the Department of Labor's salary-levels page lists that level, equivalent to $35,568 a year.

An unlicensed graduate or clerk whose pay cannot clear that level on a salary basis does not fit any of those exemptions, which leaves overtime.

The graduate studying for the bar while working at your firm sits in exactly this position until admission.

Taking on law students as unpaid summer help is its own question, separate from the clerk analysis above — our guide to paid versus unpaid internships covers it.

And if you are weighing the clerk hire itself, our guide to hiring law clerks covers the role.

Paying a practicing lawyer by the hour does not, by itself, create overtime rights under the FLSA.

The federal exemption for lawyers has no salary test and no salary-basis requirement, so an hourly arrangement can still be exempt at the federal level — the analysis runs on the license and the work, not on the pay mechanism.

What hourly pay changes is the position of everyone the lawyer provision does not fit.

For an unlicensed graduate, a law clerk, or a contract attorney whose work falls outside the practice of law, an hourly rate means the overtime analysis is live: the firm either meets another exemption's salary-and-duties pair — salary basis, at least $684 per week at the federal standard level — or pays overtime.

The combination to watch is hourly pay plus work outside the practice of law, because that is where an exemption claim can quietly fail while the paycheck looks ordinary.

In California, hourly pay can break a practicing attorney's exemption outright, because the state attaches a salary condition the federal rule does not have.

That is the next section.

The federal rule is a floor, not the whole answer.

States with their own wage-hour laws write their own exemption tests, and the four our research documented span the range — from California, which drops the no-salary carve-out for lawyers entirely, to Washington and Colorado, which keep it.

California — no salary, no exemption, even for lawyers.

Unlike federal law, California has no no-salary carve-out for lawyers: a licensed attorney primarily engaged in the practice of law is an exempt professional only if they also earn a monthly salary of at least two times the state minimum wage for full-time work, under the state's IWC Wage Order 4.

At the 2026 state minimum wage of $16.90 an hour, that works out to $70,304 a year, or $1,352 a week.

An attorney who misses that line is non-exempt — and California's overtime for non-exempt employees starts at more than eight hours in a workday as well as more than 40 in a workweek, at 1.5x.

Washington and Colorado — the federal carve-out survives.

Washington's 2026 exempt salary threshold is 2.25 times the state minimum wage for a 40-hour week, $1,541.70 per week or $80,168.40 a year — and Washington expressly does not apply that threshold to licensed lawyers actually practicing law, matching federal law.

Colorado's 2026 exempt salary for executive, administrative and professional employees is $57,784 a year, and the state's labor department states that lawyers, like doctors and teachers, can be exempt on duties alone, without a minimum salary, as in federal law.

New York — the threshold does not name professionals.

From January 1, 2026, New York's minimum weekly salary for executive and administrative employees is $1,275.00 in New York City, Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, and $1,199.10 in the rest of the state.

The state FAQ we read writes that threshold for executive and administrative employees and does not list a separate salary level for professional employees — so how New York salary-tests a practicing attorney is a question to confirm with the New York State Department of Labor, not one our sources settle.

The pattern across the four is the question to ask in any state: does the state keep the federal no-salary rule for practicing lawyers?

California answers no; Washington and Colorado answer yes.

Every figure above carries its state's 2026 date, and these numbers move — confirm the current figures with the state labor agency before you rely on them, and put any multi-state classification call in front of employment counsel.

Classification is one piece of the hiring picture; our hub on hiring for your law firm covers the rest.

Employer information, not legal advice. Exemption rules and salary thresholds change; confirm your classifications with employment counsel and the state labor agencies named above, and check the Department of Labor's current salary-levels page before you rely on the federal figures here.