Exempt or non-exempt decides who is owed overtime, so classification is a payroll decision, not a job title.
Under the FLSA, a veterinary employee is exempt only if their pay and their duties pass specific tests: a guaranteed salary of at least $684 a week and duties that fit one of the white-collar exemptions — learned professional, executive or administrative.
DOL treats credentialed vet techs as generally non-exempt; veterinarians can be exempt, but only on a qualifying salary.
Here is how each role on your roster tests out.
Rules vary by state and change
This guide explains federal rules and the state rules it names, as of the date above.
Employment law and veterinary practice rules differ by state and are revised often, so confirm current requirements with your state veterinary board, labor agency or employment counsel before you act on them.
It is general information, not legal advice.
The three tests: salary level, salary basis, duties
A non-exempt employee must be paid at least 1.5 times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, and federal law adds no daily overtime rule on top of that.
An exempt employee is owed no overtime — which is why the label is worth getting right before you set pay.
Every classification question runs through the same three gates, and all three have to pass before you treat anyone as exempt.
Gate one is the salary level.
Under the federal FLSA, the executive, administrative and professional exemptions require pay of at least $684 per week — $35,568 a year — as of October 2026.
That number is worth a pause, because you may have seen others.
In 2024, DOL issued a rule raising the level in two steps; federal courts in Texas vacated it on November 15, 2024 and again on December 30, 2024, DOL's appeals were dismissed in May 2026, and a technical amendment effective May 15, 2026 removed the vacated text from the Code of Federal Regulations, restoring the pre-2024 Part 541 regulations.
The higher 2024 thresholds of $844 and $1,128 a week are not in force — the operative level is $684.
Gate two is the salary basis.
An exempt employee must regularly receive a predetermined amount each pay period that is not reduced because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed, and must receive the full salary for any week in which they perform any work.
Paying a salary does not by itself make anyone exempt — the FLSA allows a salaried non-exempt employee as long as the overtime premium is paid too.
Gate three is the duties test.
The exemption has to fit the work, not the job title:
- Learned professional. The primary duty requires knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning, customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction — and the employee must be paid at least $684 a week on a salary or fee basis.
- Executive. The primary duty is managing the enterprise or a recognized department; the employee customarily and regularly directs the work of two or more other employees; and they have hire-and-fire authority, or their recommendations on those decisions carry particular weight.
- Administrative. The primary duty is office or non-manual work directly related to management or general business operations, and includes the exercise of discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance.
The duties tests turn on the employee's primary duty, so start from what the person actually does all week, not the offer letter.
Federal rules also define a separate highly compensated employee classification: total annual compensation of at least $107,432, which must include at least $684 a week paid on a salary or fee basis.
Now run each role on your roster through the gates.
Veterinarians: learned professionals, but the salary test still applies
An associate DVM's duties are the part of the analysis that reads as a fit on its face: the learned-professional test asks for knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning, customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.
The duties are not the gate this guide watches for DVMs.
The salary gates are.
Federal rules excuse licensed practitioners of law or medicine who are actually engaged in practice from the salary-level and salary-basis requirements, which is how a physician can be exempt without a guaranteed weekly salary.
The regulation defines the "physicians" who get that treatment as medical doctors, osteopathic physicians, podiatrists, dentists and optometrists.
Veterinarians are not on the list.
No DOL source states in so many words that "veterinarians must meet the salary test" — what the rules show is that the medical exception does not name them.
The conservative treatment is to pay an exempt associate DVM a guaranteed salary of at least $684 a week.
The exception is drawn narrowly: the same rules say it does not extend to pharmacists, nurses, therapists, technologists or "other professions which service the medical profession."
Exempt is also a ceiling you are allowed to decline.
In a January 5, 2026 opinion letter, DOL confirmed that an employer may choose to classify an employee as non-exempt even when the employee meets the learned-professional tests.
Paying an associate veterinarian hourly with overtime is a lawful choice, and it can suit a role whose hours swing week to week — at the cost of tracking time.
One gate comes before all of this for relief and per-diem DVMs: whether the vet is your employee at all.
W-2 vs 1099 for relief staff is its own classification question, covered in the practice-manager career guide — and a relief DVM engaged as a W-2 employee is run through the same learned-professional analysis as any associate.
Vet techs: why DOL treats them as non-exempt
DOL has answered this one directly.
Fact Sheet 17O, revised September 2019, states that licensed veterinary technicians are not exempt under FLSA section 13(a)(1) because they generally do not meet the learned-professional exemption requirements.
The reasoning matters as much as the conclusion.
The professional test asks whether an advanced specialized academic degree is a standard prerequisite for entry into the occupation, and that is where veterinary technology falls short in DOL's reading.
The credential is not the decider: the test turns on degree-based entry into the occupation, not on the license a state issues.
The department reached the same result decades earlier: a June 30, 1997 opinion letter about New York licensed veterinary technicians with two years of college concluded the LVTs were not exempt professionals and were owed minimum wage and overtime.
The answer has not moved between the two documents.
Walk the rest of the support staff through the duties test one at a time.
Our research found no DOL guidance naming veterinary assistants, receptionists or kennel staff, so apply the learned-professional prong — knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning, customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction — to what each person actually does.
Where a role's duties do not answer to that description, the safe default is non-exempt — hourly pay with overtime, or a salary with the overtime premium paid on top.
Reading this from the technician's side of the desk?
The career guide answering are vet techs hourly or salaried covers what the two pay shapes mean for the person earning them.
Practice managers: administrative or executive exemption
The practice manager is the role where classification is genuinely close, because two different exemptions can fit and neither comes automatic.
The executive exemption fits a manager who runs the practice or a recognized department within it.
The test wants a primary duty of managing the enterprise, customarily and regularly directing the work of two or more other employees, and hire-and-fire authority — or recommendations on those decisions given particular weight.
A manager whose hiring suggestions never actually sway a decision does not carry particular weight; a manager over just two employees clears the headcount prong.
The administrative exemption fits office or non-manual work directly related to management or general business operations, where the primary duty includes discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance.
For a practice manager, the honest question is how often the job decides things — policy, contracts, vendors, the budget — versus executing decisions someone else already made.
Both are primary-duty tests: a manager who spends most of the week in surgery as a technician and manages on top has a different primary duty from one who runs the business floor full time, and the title on the door does not change that.
Whichever duties fit, the salary gates still apply — the federal $684 a week at minimum, and the state figure wherever your state sets a higher one.
State salary thresholds higher than federal (CA, NY, WA, CO…)
The federal $684 is a floor.
States set their own exempt salary thresholds, and where a state's number is higher, that is the number the exemption has to clear.
The 2026 figures our research verified, plus one we could not:
| State | 2026 exempt salary threshold | How it is set |
|---|---|---|
| Federal (FLSA) | $684 a week ($35,568 a year) | Fixed level in the Part 541 regulations |
| California | $70,304 a year ($5,858.67 a month) | Two times the state minimum wage for full-time (40-hour) work — the 2026 minimum wage is $16.90 an hour |
| Washington | $1,541.70 a week ($80,168.40 a year) | 2.25 times the state minimum wage for a 40-hour week, regardless of employer size — the 2026 minimum wage is $17.13 an hour |
| Colorado | $1,111.23 a week ($57,784 rounded annual) | Set in the state's PAY CALC Order — the 2026 order was adopted December 8, 2025 and took effect February 1, 2026 |
| New York | Reported at $1,275.00 a week (NYC, Long Island, Westchester) and $1,199.10 a week (rest of state) | Not confirmed in the state's primary rule text — verify with the New York State Department of Labor |
California deserves a second look beyond the number.
The professional exemption in the state's wage orders names the licensed professions — law, medicine, dentistry, optometry, architecture, engineering, teaching, accounting — and veterinary medicine is not named, so a California associate DVM is exempt only through the learned-profession prong plus the duties test and the two-times-minimum-wage salary test.
Wage order matters too: California's index sends veterinary services without overnight shelter or feeding to IWC Order 4, and those that provide overnight shelter or feeding to Order 5.
New York's threshold applies to the executive and administrative exemptions, not the professional exemption — and we could not confirm the 2026 figures in the state's primary rule text.
Treat them as reported figures and confirm with the New York State Department of Labor before relying on them.
These figures move: California's $16.90 minimum wage, Washington's $17.13 and Colorado's order are all 2026 numbers.
Before you set an exempt salary in any of them, pull the current year's figure from the state labor department and run the classification against it — a salary that clears $684 a week but sits under the state line fails the exemption in that state.
Production pay and the salary basis (negative accrual risk)
Production-based pay and exempt status can coexist.
The rules let an exempt employee receive extra compensation — commissions, or a percentage of sales or profits — on top of a guaranteed salary of at least $684 a week without losing the exemption.
Up to 10 percent of the $684 weekly level itself can even be satisfied by nondiscretionary bonuses, incentives and commissions, paid annually or more frequently.
And an exempt veterinarian with the weekly guarantee in place can also be paid extra for work beyond the normal workweek — on-call pay, emergency shift pay — on any basis.
The risk sits in the guarantee.
The salary-basis rule requires a predetermined amount that is not reduced because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed.
A production plan that ends a pay period in negative accrual — the veterinarian produced below their base — and then recovers the shortfall by cutting the guaranteed weekly base salary runs straight at that sentence.
No DOL guidance speaks to veterinary negative accrual specifically — our research found none — so treat it as a risk, not a settled ruling: a clawback out of the guaranteed base is exactly the kind of reduction the salary-basis language describes, and it is the question to take to employment counsel before payroll runs it that way again.
For the plan itself — percentages, base, accrual mechanics — our guide to structuring ProSal covers the design.
Deduction habits reach beyond ProSal.
An actual practice of making improper salary deductions demonstrates that the employer did not intend to pay on a salary basis, and the cost is the exemption itself — for that period, for employees in the same job classification working under the same managers.
Write the deduction policy down, follow it, and leave the guaranteed base alone.
A classification pass over your roster
- Go role by role and write down what each person actually does most of the week — the duties, not the job title.
- Check the pay: is the employee guaranteed at least $684 a week on a salary basis, and more where your state sets a higher threshold?
- Match the primary duty to learned professional, executive or administrative — all three gates pass, or the role is non-exempt.
- Treat credentialed veterinary technicians as non-exempt; a salary is fine, overtime is not optional.
- For practice managers, document direct reports, hire-and-fire authority, and decisions made independently before claiming an exemption.
- Audit your deduction practices and any negative-accrual clawbacks against the salary-basis rule before the next payroll run.
- Where the answer is genuinely close, put the question to employment counsel — the fix is cheaper before a complaint than after.