The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated the Biden administration’s overtime rule on Nov. 15. In its ruling, which applies nationwide, the court criticized the rule’s rise in the salary threshold level as displacing the duties test for the white-collar exemptions by being too steep.

In addition, the court struck down the automatic increases in the salary threshold every three years that the rule had set in place, finding that this violated the notice-and-comment period requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.

The court concluded that the 2024 rule was not based on a permissible construction. Like the 2016 rule’s attempt to dramatically increase the minimum salary level from the 20th to the 40th percentile of full-time, salaried workers in the South, the 2024 rule mandated raising the minimum salary level for white-collar exemptions from the 20th to the 35th percentile—$58,656 annually—on Jan. 1, 2025.

This article courtesy of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)