What changed, and why it matters on a cleaning account
On May 15, 2026, the Department of Labor published a technical amendment removing the vacated 2024 overtime rule from the Code of Federal Regulations and republishing the regulatory text as it stood before that rule, per 91 FR 27833. The DOL's own announcement, in its May 14, 2026 release, states the restored regulations require most exempt executive, administrative and professional employees to be paid at least $684 per week, with a highly compensated employee threshold of $107,432.
The procedural history is straightforward. The 2019 rule raised the standard salary level from $455 to $684 a week, effective January 1, 2020. The 2024 rule raised it to $844 a week from July 1, 2024, with a further step to $1,128 a week from January 1, 2025, and built in automatic triennial updates. Two federal district courts in Texas vacated the rule in late 2024. The Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeals on May 5 and May 7, 2026, which made the district court decisions final, and the department then restored the pre-2024 text effective immediately. There is no automatic update scheduled now, as Benesch's analysis points out.
$684 a week is $35,568 a year. If that sounds low for a supervisor running a $2 million-a-year janitorial route, that is the point: the federal floor stopped being the number that governs most real supervisors in this industry.
The test is three parts, and the salary is only one
Exemption requires all three: the duties test, payment on a salary basis, and the salary level. Dropping the level does not loosen the duties test. A working lead who spends most of the shift stripping and waxing floors with the crew is not an exempt executive just because her payroll code says so, and if she is classified exempt on a salary under $684 a week you have both a classification problem and an overtime problem.
For janitorial specifically, the department publishes Fact Sheet #4 on the security guard and maintenance service industries. Its short-list of common violations is a useful audit checklist:
- Every person who works must be paid. Family members working as a couple or team are not exempt from payroll because of the relationship.
- Overtime is due after 40 hours in the workweek to all non-exempt employees regardless of how they are paid. Hourly, piece rate, task basis, salary: the 40-hour rule applies the same way, and hours cannot be averaged over two weeks.
- Hours worked at multiple buildings count together. "The hours worked by a janitor who works in more than one establishment must be counted together for overtime purposes." This is the single biggest exposure for contractors running multiple small accounts with the same people.
- Minors under 16 cannot work past 7:00 p.m. except from June 1 through Labor Day, when they may work until 9:00 p.m. Summer school-cleaning crews staffed with 15-year-olds for evening shifts are a compliance problem with a calendar attached.
Travel time is hours worked, and that is where the money hides
The DOL's hours-worked rules matter more in janitorial than in almost any other service industry, because your product is delivered at addresses you do not own and your crews move between them.
From the department's FLSA Hours Worked Advisor: "Time you spend traveling as part of your principal activity, including performing job-related work prior to getting to the work site and traveling between job sites during the workday, is hours worked." The advisor says this plainly: that time is part of the day's work and must be counted "regardless of contract, custom, or practice." Fact Sheet #4 states the same rule for guards: "Travel time between work sites must be treated as hours worked."
For a company running a route of four small offices a night with one car and a two-person crew, the drive between buildings is paid time. If your timekeeping starts the clock at the first building and stops it at the last, you are under-reporting hours every single night, and the 40-hour threshold gets crossed without anyone noticing because nobody is adding the windshield time.
Related items from Fact Sheet #22: rest breaks of 20 minutes or less are paid time; a bona fide meal period of 30 minutes or more is not, but only if the employee is completely relieved of duty. A working lunch answering tenant calls is paid. Work you did not ask for but suffered or permitted, like a cleaner staying 20 minutes to finish a restroom she was assigned, is paid, and the reason does not matter.
If you run a day porter post, that is a different cost structure and a different risk profile. Day porter work is interruptible, visible and interaction-heavy. It typically pays a premium over night crew in the same market, and it puts a supervisor-adjacent person in front of the client during business hours, which is both a retention asset and a wage-and-hour exposure if that person's hours are not tracked carefully.
The state floors are the real number
The federal reset does not touch state law, and several states set a higher salary threshold for their own overtime exemptions. Colorado, for example, requires $1,111.23 per week, or $57,784 a year, for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions, which supersedes the federal minimum, per the AR Group's summary. If you operate in a state with its own threshold, the federal number is irrelevant to that site.
This creates a specific trap for multi-state contractors. A supervisor in Ohio at $40,000 a year and a supervisor in Colorado at $40,000 a year are doing the same job for the same company, and one is exempt while the other is not. The Colorado supervisor is owed overtime for every hour over 40 retroactively, and the lookback period is not one pay period.
The audit to run this quarter
- Pull the salary for every exempt employee in operations, site supervision, and account management. Flag anyone under $684 a week and anyone in a state with a higher threshold who is under that state's number.
- Read the duties, not the title. A site supervisor who cleans for most of the shift is an hourly employee with a different job title. Document what the person actually does.
- Reconstruct hours for multi-site cleaners with travel time included, for the last two quarters. Compare to what was paid. That comparison is your exposure estimate, and it is also the forecast for what the job should cost you per month going forward.
- Fix the timekeeping so travel between buildings is captured at the system level rather than in someone's judgment. This is the fix that stops the problem from re-accumulating.
- Decide whether to raise salaries or reclassify. Some supervisors should get the raise to the state threshold and stay exempt, because their duties support it. Others should move to hourly with tight scheduling, because a working lead is not an executive and pretending otherwise is the liability.
One more piece of the same puzzle, since it shows up in the same payroll file: the FLSA does not let you shift required equipment costs onto the employee in a way that cuts the hourly rate below minimum wage or eats into overtime. Fact Sheet #4 covers uniforms and dry cleaning for guards and the same principle applies to cleaners. Deducting the cost of a new uniform or the cleaning of it from a paycheck can create a wage violation even when the hourly rate on paper looks compliant.
Why the reset is a good moment
A temporary threshold cut is not permission to stop managing classifications. It is an opportunity to get the structure right while the federal pressure is off, so the next rule, or your next state's rule, does not turn into a retroactive bill.
The direction of travel is not toward fewer exemptions. Colorado's number is nearly $58,000. A contractor who has built the discipline to run state-by-state thresholds, track travel time and pay overtime correctly is operating in the mode the regulation will keep pushing him toward. The ones who treat the reset as a reprieve will pay for it twice: once in the claims and once in the scramble.
Sources: DOL Wage and Hour Division release, May 14, 2026; 91 FR 27833 (May 15, 2026); DOL Fact Sheets #4 and #22; DOL FLSA Hours Worked Advisor; Benesch and AR Group analyses of the reinstated exemptions.
