Professional Exemption in California – Who does it cover?

If you have a salaried white-collar job in California, you may fall under the “professional exemption.” This means you are exempt from certain wage and hour protections, such as:

• minimum wage,
• overtime pay, and
• rest and meal breaks.

If your employer is misclassifying you as an exempt professional when you are really non-exempt, you are missing out on those protections. Your job is “professionally exempt” only if it passes both these tests that California courts rely on:

1. The Salary Test and
2. The Duties Test.

Unless your job meets both of these tests, you may be non-exempt. If your employer has been misclassifying you as exempt, you can recover your unpaid overtime wages and any other benefits owed by either:

• filing a wage theft complaint with the Labor Commissioner or
• bring a wage/hour lawsuit against the employer.

In this article, California labor and employment lawyers explain everything you need to know about professional exemption laws and your options if you are being misclassified. Click on a topic to jump to that section.

• 1. Salary Test
• 2. Duties Test
• 3. Other Exemptions
• 4. If You Are Misclassified
• 5. Federal Law
• Additional Reading

1. Salary Test

To pass the Salary Test, you first must earn a salary regardless of the number of hours you work. Therefore, if you are paid hourly, you are not professionally exempt.

In addition, your salary must be at least $5,729 per month ($68,640 per year) for you to be professionally exempt in 2025. This number is calculated by doubling California’s minimum wage ($16.50 an hour) based on a full-time (40-hour) workweek.

Note that if your employer ever deducts partial rather than full days from your salary due to absences from work, that suggests you are an hourly employee and are therefore non-exempt.

Also note that employers should not dock your salary to discipline you. If they do, however, it may change your exempt status depending on various factors. An attorney can help determine whether you are still exempt.¹

In sum, to be professionally exempt, you must pass both this Salary Test as well as the Duties Test, discussed below.

2. Duties Test

Professionally exempt employees in California must meet the requirements of both the Salary Test (discussed above) and the Duties Test.

The first prong of the Duties Test is that you regularly exercise discretion and independent judgment in the performance of your job duties. Furthermore, more of half your time in the job is spent performing those duties.

Note that California courts do not care what your job title is or what your job description says, which can be misleading or inaccurate. When determining whether you are professionally exempt, all judges consider is what you actually do.

The second prong of the Duties Test is that your job qualifies as either:

• a learned professional,
• an artistic professional, or
• a “recognized profession” listed in the statute.²

These are discussed in more detail below.

Learned Professionals

Like it sounds, learned professionals do work that requires advanced knowledge in science or learning. These professionals are typically well-educated in the field they are working in.

However, learned professionals do not include people who primarily conduct routine or automated tasks that involve no intellectual rigor. For example, someone with an advanced biology degree would likely not be an exempt professional if all they did was manual laboratory tasks that require no interpretation or synthesis of information.³

Artistic Professional

Also like it sounds, artistic professionals do imaginative and original work driven by their own talent and creativity. Furthermore, their work must require special skills or training. Examples include:

• Musicians,
• Actors,
• Visual artists, and
• Writers.

Trained artists whose job does not require creativity – such as tracing – probably would not qualify as artistic professionals. However, cartoonists tasked with creating the cartoon that someone else traces would probably be professionally exempt.

Similarly, news writers who simply report the news would probably not qualify as exempt professionals. Meanwhile, opinion (“op-ed”) journalists who offer their own analysis of the news probably would be exempt professionals.

In short, if your job duty is a mechanical art or skilled trade with little room for discretion or independent judgment, you are likely not professionally exempt.⁴

Recognized Profession

Your job is a “recognized profession” if you are licensed or certified in California to work in either:

• Accounting,
• Architecture,
• Dentistry,
• Engineering,
• Law,
• Medicine,
• Optometry, or
• Teaching.

However, there are some extra requirements and exceptions.⁵

Medicine

For physicians to be an exempted professional in California, their salary must amount to no less than $103.75 an hour.  Also, exempted professionals do not include pharmacists, physician interns, physician residents, and doctors who are covered under collective bargaining agreements.

Advanced practice nurses (APNs) can be exempt professionals if they are certified nurse midwives, anasthetists, or practitioners and also pass the Salaries and Duties Tests. Otherwise, nurses typically do not qualify under the professional exemption.⁶

Teaching

California teachers meet the professional exemption only if they:

• teach under a certificate from the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, or
• teach at an accredited institution of higher learning

Vocational training schools may count if they meet certain standards regarding their faculty, library, curriculum, certification, and accreditation. Exempt professionals do not include tutors, student teachers, or teaching assistants.

For K-12 private school teachers to be exempt as professional, they must have a B.A. from an accredited institution or a teaching credential from any state. Also, their salary can be lower than the standard professional exemption cutoff of $68,640 per year; however, the salary has to be at least the greater of:

• The lowest salary of any California public school teacher or
• At least 70% of the lowest salary of any public school teacher in the local school district or county.⁷

Certain professional employees are exempt from overtime protections.

3. Other Exemptions

If your job does not pass the Salary Test and Duties Test for a professional exemption in California, your job may still be exempt if you qualify as either:

• An executive, which requires management and the authority to hire and fire workers;
• An administrative employee, which involves doing work related to management policies or general business operations;
• An outside salesperson, who works more than one-half of the time away from the employer’s place of business; or
• A computer employee with an annual salary of at least $118,657.43.

If you are unsure whether your job qualifies under any of the exemptions recognized under California law, contact an attorney.⁸

4. If You Are Misclassified

If you are misclassified as exempt when you are really non-exempt, you are missing out on overtime pay. As a non-exempt employee in California, your are entitled to 1.5 times your wages if you work:

• more than 8 hours in a workday,
• more than 40 hours in a workweek, and/or
• more than 6 consecutive days in a workweek.

Meanwhile, your wages get doubled if you work:

• more than 12 hours in a workday and/or
• more than 8 hours on the seventh consecutive day in a workweek.

Furthermore, non-exempt employees are generally entitled to an unpaid 30-minute meal break for every five hours of work and a paid 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work. If you are denied these breaks, you are owed one hour of pay for each missed break.⁹

If speaking with your employer does not solve the problem, you can try recovering your back pay by filing a wage claim with the Labor Commissioner’s Office. If the Commissioner finds in your favor, they will order your employer to pay you what you are owed.

Another option is to file a traditional wage and hour lawsuit against your employer. This takes more time and money, though the payout can potentially be higher. Speak with an attorney about what options are best for you.

5. Federal Law

Federal law regarding professional exemptions is largely similar to California law..

The primary difference is the minimum salary threshold, which is only $684 a week. California law requires a minimum salary of $1,320 a week. This makes sense considering the minimum wage under federal law ($7.25 an hour) is less than half of California’s ($16.50 an hour).

Whenever California law conflicts with federal law, California employers are supposed to apply the law that provides employees with the most protection.¹⁰

Additional Resources

For more information, refer to the following:

• Rethinking the Managerial-Professional Exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act – American University Law Review.
• The Bona Fide Professional Exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act as Applied to Accountancy – ALSB Journal of Employment and Labor Law.
• Solving the Bluish Collar Problem: An Analysis of the DOL’s Modernization of the Exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act – University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law.
• FLSA Developments: DOL and the Courts – The Practical Lawyer.
• FLSA Exemptions – Wage and Hour Law.

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Legal References