Job title never determines whether a position is exempt from overtime — the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) applies a three-part test, and a role must pass all three to qualify.

1. The salary basis test: the employee must be paid a fixed, predetermined salary that doesn’t fluctuate based on hours worked or quality of work.
2. The salary level test: as of 2026, that salary must meet the federal minimum of $684 per week ($35,568 per year) — falling short of this number makes an employee non-exempt regardless of duties or title.
3. The duties test: the employee’s actual day-to-day responsibilities must meet the specific criteria for one of the recognized exemption categories — most relevantly for child care centers, the “executive” exemption, which requires the employee’s primary duty to be managing the organization (or a recognized department or subdivision of it), along with the authority to direct the work of at least two full-time employees and genuine input into hiring, firing, or promotion decisions.

This is why a Center Director who meets the salary threshold can still be misclassified as exempt if their actual daily work is dominated by classroom coverage, front-desk duties, or hands-on child care rather than management — and why Teachers and Aides, whose core responsibilities are direct instruction and care rather than administrative management, almost never meet the duties test regardless of how they’re paid. Paying someone a salary, by itself, changes nothing — all three tests must be satisfied independently, and failing any one of them makes overtime pay mandatory for hours worked beyond 40 in a workweek.

The table below summarizes classification and overtime rules for the roles and situations most common in a child care center.

Role	Classification & Justification	Employer Best Practice
Teachers & Aides	Non-Exempt: classroom routines do not meet professional/administrative exemption tests. Must be paid hourly.	Audit job descriptions annually; avoid misclassifying staff as salaried exempt
Directors / Administrators	Exempt Executive: only if the salary threshold is met AND they regularly manage 2+ staff with discretionary authority.	Ensure duties match actual administrative authority, not just job titles.

Overtime Pay Rules

Non-exempt are entitled to overtime pay at a rate of 1.5 x their normal hourly rate for hours worked over 40 hours in a single 7-day workweek. Under no circumstances can non-exempt employees be provided “comp time” in lieu of overtime.

Dual-Role Staff

When an employee works two different roles at two different pay rates for the same employer in the same workweek — for example, Teacher during the day and Van Driver in the afternoon — overtime cannot be calculated using either rate alone. Instead, the FLSA requires a weighted average (also called a “blended rate”), calculated in three steps:

Step 1: Calculate total straight-time earnings for the week.
Multiply the hours worked in each role by that role’s hourly rate, then add the two together.

Step 2: Divide total earnings by total hours worked to find the regular rate.
This blended number — not either individual hourly rate — is the “regular rate” used for overtime purposes that week.

Step 3: Add a half-time premium for each overtime hour.
Because Step 1 already paid straight-time for every hour worked (including the overtime hours), the employee is only owed an additional half of the regular rate for each hour over 40 — not a full 1.5x on top of what’s already been paid.

Worked Example

An employee works 32 hours as a Teacher at $18/hour and 10 hours as a Van Driver at $15/hour in the same week — 42 hours total, 2 of them overtime.

Step	Calculation	Result
1. Straight-time earnings	(32 × $18) + (10 × $15) = $576 + $150	$726.00
2. Regular rate	$726.00 ÷ 42 hours	$17.29/hr
3. Overtime premium	$17.29 × 0.5 × 2 OT hours	$17.29
Total weekly pay	$726.00 + $17.29	$743.29

One additional note worth including: an employer can agree in advance — before the workweek begins — to pay overtime based on the rate tied to whichever role the overtime hours fall into, instead of the blended rate. But that requires a specific prior agreement with the employee. Absent one, the weighted average above is the default and the legally safe method — which is almost certainly the situation for most centers, so it’s worth stating the blended-rate method as the standard practice rather than mentioning the alternative as equally available.