Tennessee State Overtime Labor Laws

The state of Tennessee has no wage laws concerning overtime, as it doesn’t have any particular state laws regarding other wage issues such as the minimum wage or regulations for the management of salaried employees.

Tennessee then defers, as we’ve seen in other states, to the laws of the United States Department of Labor, from its Wage and Hour Division. The department is responsible for enforcing the federal laws on overtime and other wage issues. This law—and the name of it could start having a familiar ring to it after we’ve talked about it so much—is called the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA for short, is the law that regulates most things wage, including minimum wage, overtime issues, and the management of salaried employees. For detailed information on he FLSA, Tennessee employers and employees could look into the U.S. Department of Labor’s Web site, specifically the one for the Wage and Hour Division.

Or Tennessee employers and employees could get a pretty basic understand of what the federal law on overtime says by reading this here blog. The basic tenet of the Fair Labor Standards Act when it comes to overtime is that the federal government considers the average work week to consist of 40 hours.

That means that overtime kicks in for employers and employees when the employee works more than those 40 hours in a week, or seven-day period. What happens then? The employee ought to get overtime premium pay, which amounts to one and a half times their normal hourly wage, for all time over that 40 hour cutoff in a work week.

It’s interesting to know that in Tennessee, the federal law doesn’t cover all employers. The federal law technically only is for interstate employers in Tennessee, those with more than $500,000 in yearly revenue, and hospitals, schools, and government institutions, among others.