The book of: Employer Wage & Hour Basics (FLSA)
Introduction
Every federal wage and hour rule an employer runs on, in plain English — what counts as hours worked, what overtime is owed, who is exempt, and what you must keep.
Every employer eventually asks the same question: is this person owed overtime, and for which hours? The Fair Labor Standards Act answers it, but the Act itself is only the starting point — the rules an employer actually applies live in the regulations written under it, spread across tests for coverage, exemption, and pay, each carrying its own exceptions. None of it reduces to a single sentence, and getting it wrong is expensive in ways that compound with every missed paycheck. This book exists to make that rulebook readable without flattening what makes it hard.
What this book is
THE BOOK OF: Employer Wage & Hour Basics is a plain-English guide to the federal wage and hour rules an employer runs on day to day — what counts as hours worked, how overtime is calculated, who qualifies for an exemption, and what records the law requires an employer to keep. Each chapter works through one piece of that system in the order an employer actually needs it, building on what came before rather than repeating it.
Who it is for
This book is for anyone who decides what a worker is paid — small-business owners, office managers, payroll and HR staff — and for the employee who wants to check the answer they were given. No legal background is assumed anywhere in it.
How this book is built
Built from the pinned source
Every chapter is written against a pinned snapshot of the Code of Federal Regulations, fetched from eCFR's versioner API and stored with the edition date it was taken from, so a claim in this book can always be traced back to the exact text it came from. Wage and hour law is a two-instrument subject — the Fair Labor Standards Act is the statute, and the rules employers actually work from live in the regulations written under it. This book teaches the regulations; where a point turns on the statute itself rather than on the regulation, it says so and names the provision instead of paraphrasing text it has not pinned.
Reviewed twice
Every chapter passes through two separate reviews before it is published — one checking accuracy against the pinned source, the other checking that a reader without a legal background can actually follow it.
Kept current
When the underlying source changes, the affected chapter is revisited and updated rather than left to go stale.
How the book is organized
The book moves in one arc, front to back. Chapters 1 through 5 establish who is covered by the Act, how the exempt employee test works, and what a properly paid salary requires. Chapters 6 through 10 turn to the arithmetic — which hours count, how the regular rate is built from any pay structure, and the pay schemes designed to shrink it. Chapters 11 through 13 cover recordkeeping and what follows once a violation is found. Chapter 1, Minimum wage, overtime, and who the Act covers, and Chapter 2, The exempt employee test: salary basis, salary level, and primary duty, are free to read in full; the chapters that follow build directly on what those two establish.
How to read a section
Before you start
Two limits are worth stating here rather than leaving a reader to discover them. First, exemption questions turn on case law and Department of Labor opinion letters as much as on the regulation itself; this book states what the regulation requires, but it does not settle a close classification dispute, and a close call belongs with a professional. Second, this book covers the federal floor. State law frequently requires more — a higher minimum wage, daily overtime, meal and rest breaks — and where it does, the state rule governs. Nothing in this book should be read as the whole of what an employer owes a worker.