As Chapter 1’s § 1.6 established, the Act’s recordkeeping requirement is not one-size-fits-all. § 516.2(a) sets out twelve items every employer must keep for an employee covered by the minimum-wage or overtime provisions. The exemptions built out across Chapters 2 through 4 cover an employee in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) capacity — including academic administrative personnel or teachers in elementary or secondary schools — or in outside sales. For those employees, § 516.3 lets the employer drop five of those twelve items. Four of the five — the regular hourly rate, hours worked, straight-time earnings, and overtime premium — exist to support an hourly-rate, regular-rate, and overtime calculation that an exempt employee’s pay doesn’t require. The fifth, total additions to or deductions from wages, is general wage-adjustment recordkeeping rather than a rate calculation, and § 516.3 drops it along with the other four.

The five dropped items are paragraphs (6) through (10) of § 516.2(a): the regular hourly rate and the basis and exclusions behind it, hours worked each workday and total hours each workweek, total straight-time earnings (wages for hours worked, exclusive of the overtime premium) for the workday or workweek, total premium pay for overtime hours, and the total additions to or deductions from wages each pay period. Everything else in § 516.2(a) still applies to an exempt EAP employee — full name and any identifying symbol, home address with zip code, date of birth (if under 19), sex and occupation, the time and day the workweek begins, total wages paid each pay period, and the date of payment and pay period it covers.

In place of those five dropped items, § 516.3 adds one requirement nonexempt records don’t carry: the basis on which wages are paid, in enough detail to permit calculating the employee’s total remuneration for each pay period, including fringe benefits and prerequisites. § 516.3 uses the word “prerequisites” here rather than the more familiar “perquisites,” and that is the regulation’s own wording (both words refer to the same thing: non-cash extras like insurance coverage or paid vacation, not a separate category of pay). The regulation’s own examples show how thin this can be — a dollar figure per week, per month, or per month plus commissions, with an addendum such as “plus hospitalization and insurance plan A” or “2 weeks paid vacation.”