The FLSA Duties Tests: All Six Exempt Categories (2026)

The manager spends approximately 80% of their shift performing the same non-supervisory tasks as hourly associates: stocking shelves, running registers, assisting customers, unloading trucks. They have the title 'assistant manager' and a salary above $684/week. However, their primary duty as actually performed is not management - it is the same production work as hourly employees. The executive exemption requires management to be the primary duty, and 29 CFR 541.106 allows concurrent non-exempt work only while management stays primary. The DOL has enforced that reading against a national retailer: on 1 May 2012 the Wage and Hour Division announced it had recovered $4,828,442 in back wages and damages for more than 4,500 Wal-Mart vision centre managers and asset protection coordinators the company had treated as exempt, plus $463,815 in civil money penalties. Private assistant-manager cases are fact-specific and have gone both ways, so what decides it is the duties as actually performed, not the chain's job architecture.

The supervisor manages a shift, directs 3 crew members, handles customer complaints, and assigns work - but also regularly operates the fryer and cash register alongside the crew. If management is the most important aspect of the position (even if less than 50% of clock time), and if the supervisor has genuine hire/fire input, the executive exemption may apply. Key: does the employer give particular weight to the supervisor's staffing recommendations? If yes, likely exempt. If the 'recommendations' are rubber-stamped by a district manager, the authority test may fail.

Paralegals apply specific legal procedures and standards defined by attorneys. They do not exercise the kind of independent professional discretion that characterises exempt professionals. The regulation names them: 29 CFR 541.301(e)(7) provides that paralegals and legal assistants generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialised academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for entry into the field - most specialised paralegal programmes are two-year associate degrees. The same paragraph leaves one door open: a paralegal who holds an advanced specialised degree in a different professional field and applies that field's knowledge on the job can qualify, the regulation's own example being an engineer hired as a paralegal to advise on product liability or patent matters.

29 CFR 541.301(e)(2) draws the line on state registration rather than on years of study: registered nurses who are registered by the appropriate state examining board generally meet the duties requirements for the learned professional exemption, while licensed practical nurses and similar health care employees generally do not, because a specialised advanced academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for entry into those occupations. Watch the trap in the word 'duties': meeting the duties test is not the same as being exempt. An RN paid hourly fails the salary basis test and is non-exempt no matter how the duties read, which is why a large share of hospital RNs are correctly paid overtime. Note also that California's stricter test requires more than 50% of time on exempt duties.

A software engineer at a SaaS company designing, developing, and testing application code qualifies under the computer employee exemption - this is precisely the work the regulation targets. An IT support technician whose primary duty is password resets, hardware troubleshooting, and ticket triage does NOT qualify - applying specific standards from vendor manuals is not 'systems analysis' or 'software engineering' as defined in 29 CFR 541.400. The distinction matters frequently in tech companies that apply a blanket computer exemption to all IT roles.