A salary does not make someone exempt from overtime.
That single mistake costs more than every other wage error combined. Three tests decide it — how the pay is delivered, how much it is, and what the person actually does all day — and the third one is where employers who got the first two right still lose.
Underneath it, the floors move. Most state minimum wages change on 1 January, cities set their own above the state, and a federal overtime rule that employers had already budgeted for was struck down in court. Every figure here carries the day somebody read it off the statute or the state's own labor department, and says so when that was a while ago.
Start with What you owe, in the order it comes up: six questions that only work in sequence, and a board of all 50 states and DC.
The first checks are being written. The path at What you owe shows the six questions in order, which of them are answered yet, and the angle each unwritten one will be written from.
What the stamp is promising
- Read at the source
- The statute, the state labor department, or the Department of Labor. Not a payroll vendor's blog, and not an aggregator quoting one.
- Dated, not "updated"
- The day the amounts were checked, printed on the article. Older than the stamp means nobody has looked since.
- Gaps are labeled
- What could not be confirmed is named as unverified rather than quietly borrowed from someone else.