Labor Department enforces 2019 overtime thresholds after court vacates 2024 rule

What changed, and why it matters now

The Labor Department’s overtime guidance is back on familiar ground: for enforcement, it is applying the 2019 thresholds after a federal court vacated the 2024 rule. That means the operative salary floor is $684 per week, and the highly compensated employee threshold is $107,432 a year, even though the agency had published a broader update in April 2024.

That sequence is not a technical footnote. It is the difference between a manager assuming a salaried employee is automatically exempt and a manager actually checking whether the role meets the current federal test. For people at monday.com, where responsibilities can shift fast across engineering, product, sales, and operations, that distinction can decide whether extra hours are legally unpaid or must be treated as overtime.

Why the 2024 rule is not the rule being enforced

The Labor Department published its final rule on April 26, 2024, updating the exemptions for executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and computer employees. Then, on November 15, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated that rule. The department now says it is enforcing the 2019 salary level while lawsuits over the 2024 rule continue in two other federal district courts.

That matters because old headlines can linger long after the legal standard has shifted. A company can be planning around a newer threshold that is no longer being enforced, or employees can assume a pay raise made them exempt when the legal test still turns on the salary level and the actual duties performed. The safest reading is the simplest one: until the department says otherwise, the 2019 rules control enforcement.

Salary is only part of the test

The biggest workplace misunderstanding is also the most expensive one: being salaried does not automatically make someone exempt from overtime. The Labor Department’s framework still requires a salary basis, but it also requires that the worker’s duties fit one of the exemption categories. Those categories include executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and computer employees.

That is especially relevant in a tech company like monday.com, where job scope can blur across functions. An engineer, a product manager, or a technical operations lead may be paid as a salaried professional, but the real question is whether the day-to-day work fits the exemption criteria the department is actually enforcing. The same goes for sales roles, where a title alone does not determine whether the outside sales exemption applies.

The highly compensated employee threshold adds another layer. At $107,432 a year, the current enforcement floor signals that the department is still focused on who is truly exempt, not just who is paid well. High pay can simplify the analysis, but it does not erase it.

What monday.com’s scale means for classification risk

monday.com is no longer a small startup where managers can improvise around compensation rules. The company said it reached $972.0 million in fiscal 2024 revenue, up 33% year over year, and it said it surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue that same year. In fiscal 2025, revenue rose to $1.232 billion, up 27% year over year. That kind of growth usually brings more layers, more specialization, and more pressure to stretch teams.

Scale also raises the cost of getting worker classification wrong. monday.com said in its March 2025 annual report that it has offices in New York and Denver, and its careers page lists additional offices in Tel Aviv, Chicago, London, Warsaw, Sydney, Melbourne, São Paulo, and Tokyo. A 2023 announcement said the Denver office was opened to support growing sales opportunities and serve as a critical U.S. hub. With a larger U.S. footprint, overtime rules are not abstract compliance language. They are part of payroll, workload planning, and manager training.

The company’s customer base shows the same kind of reach. monday.com said it served approximately 245,000 customers across more than 200 industries and in over 200 countries and territories. That breadth is a reminder that classification questions do not sit in one department. They can surface anywhere people are asked to do more, move faster, or cover more territory.

Where teams most often get it wrong

Inside a company like monday.com, the mistakes are predictable. A manager sees a person on salary and assumes overtime is off the table. A team lead reassigns work that pushes an employee into a different set of duties but never revisits classification. Sales leaders sometimes treat every account executive as outside sales, even when the role includes heavy internal coordination or no meaningful outside-sales pattern.

The Labor Department’s current rules make that kind of shortcut risky. A computer employee analysis may matter for some technical roles, but not every engineer or technical contributor fits the exemption automatically. In the same way, an enterprise sales role may include full sales-cycle ownership, commercial negotiations, strategic account planning, and cross-functional coordination, but those duties still need to be examined against the exemption rules, not just admired as strong performance.

The real mistake is treating the title as the test. Federal enforcement turns on the job, not the label.

What employees should look for in their own role

If you work at monday.com, a useful first question is not whether you are salaried. It is what your actual work looks like week to week. Do you spend most of your time independently making high-level decisions, managing people, or using specialized professional or computer-related expertise? Or are you covering a mix of tasks that look more operational, more supervised, or more sales-support oriented than the title suggests?

A second question is whether your role has changed without a classification review. Growth often means someone who started with a narrow scope now handles broader territory, more cross-functional work, or more customer-facing responsibility. That can affect exemption status in either direction, which is why promotions, reorganizations, and team expansion should trigger a fresh look.

A practical checklist can help:

• Confirm whether you are paid on a salary basis and at what level.
• Compare your actual duties with the exemption category your role is using.
• Ask whether recent changes to your work have changed your legal classification.
• If you manage people, make sure compensation decisions follow current enforcement rules, not stale assumptions.

What managers should do before the next team change

Managers should treat overtime classification as part of workforce design, not as a payroll cleanup after the fact. If a team is scaling quickly, if a product launch is adding urgent work, or if a sales organization is expanding into new markets, the role descriptions may be drifting faster than the compensation review process. That is where problems start.

At monday.com, where product innovation and rapid growth are part of the business model, the pressure to ask salaried employees for just a little more time is constant. The law does not care whether the request feels temporary. It cares whether the worker is exempt under the rules the Labor Department is enforcing now.

The bottom line is blunt: the court vacated the 2024 overtime rule, and the department is using the 2019 thresholds for enforcement. For monday.com employees and managers, that puts the focus back where it belongs, on duties, salary level, and the real work being done every day.