An employee’s right to sue an employer under section 16(b) of the Act for unpaid minimum wages or unpaid overtime compensation does not last indefinitely. Under § 790.21, an action to enforce a claim accruing on or after May 14, 1947 must be commenced within two years of when the cause of action accrues. That clock runs from a specific, recurring event: the cause of action accrues each time the employer fails to pay the required compensation for a given workweek at the regular payday for the period in which that workweek ends. For an individual claimant, a suit is treated as “commenced” on the date the complaint is filed. In a collective action (where multiple employees sue together), commencement for each claimant depends on timing. If the claimant is named as a party plaintiff in the complaint and their written consent to join is filed with the court that same date, commencement is the date the complaint is filed. Otherwise, commencement is the later date the written consent is filed. Practically, the two-year period is not one deadline but a rolling one: each underpaid workweek starts its own two-year window, so wages that fell due more than two years before a suit is filed are generally out of reach.

§ 578.3(c) supplies the Wage and Hour Division’s working definition of a “willful” violation for purposes of assessing civil money penalty exposure under § 578.3: the employer knew its conduct was prohibited by the Act, or showed reckless disregard for whether it complied. All of the facts and circumstances surrounding the violation are weighed together. An employer who received advice from a responsible Wage and Hour Division official that its conduct was unlawful and pressed on anyway can be found to have acted knowingly — though that advice alone does not automatically establish willfulness. Reckless disregard is broader still: it can be found where an employer should have inquired further into whether its pay practice complied with the Act and simply failed to make that further inquiry.

As covered in Chapter 12, a Wage and Hour Division investigation that finds a violation can lead to a civil money penalty. § 578.3(a)(2) ties the size of that exposure directly to willfulness: a penalty of up to $2,515 per violation may be assessed against any person who repeatedly or willfully violates section 6 or section 7 of the Act. “Person” is defined broadly under § 578.2(c) to reach beyond the employer entity itself, to partnerships, corporations, and other legal representatives, and the provision applies to repeated or willful minimum-wage and overtime violations specifically, not every violation of those sections. For the employer, that makes the willfulness finding a real fork in the road: the same unpaid wages carry materially different total exposure depending on whether the violation is found to be an isolated, good-faith error or one made knowingly or with reckless disregard for the law.