How Do You Determine Whether an Employee Qualifies for Exemption?

Today’s episode summarizes all we have discussed regarding the FLSA exemption and provides an assessment that we recommend you perform with every single one of your employees.

Even if the information you write down is not entirely accurate, simply having this information on paper for each of your employees makes a huge difference whenever a situation calls for you to recall these critical factors.

On each evaluation sheet, provide the following information:

  • Name
  • Job category/ID
  • Name and title of the evaluator
  • Company name and tax ID
  • Direct supervisor’s name (if applicable)
  • Date of evaluation

There are eight categories under which employees can qualify as exempt:

  • Administrative exemption
  • Learned professional exemption
  • Creative professional exemption
  • Computer employee exemption
  • Outside sales exemption
  • Highly-compensated employee exemption
  • Business owner exemption
  • Executive exemption

On your evaluation sheet, respond “yes” or “no” to each of the listed statements. A response of “yes” to every statement supports a determination of exempt status for that category; a response of “no” to one or more statements supports a determination of nonexempt status. Employees may fall under more than one of these categories. 

Should the employee be determined to be exempt, select all of the categories they fall under, out of the eight. Otherwise, note down that the employee does not qualify for an exemption.

About the author, Rhamy

Rhamy grew up watching and working with his mother and grandmother in the senior insurance market. This familiarity with the struggles faced by people trying to navigate the incredibly complicated and heavily regulated healthcare market led him to start Poplar Financial while working on his degree at the University of Memphis. After completing his MBA and Bachelors in Finance and Economics, Rhamy guided Poplar Financial through the disruptive opportunity that is the Affordable Care Act. Since then Poplar Financial has received numerous awards from major insurance carriers and has completed its fourth year in a row of doubling in size. Now his team focuses on the processes around human resources and specializes in providing companies with between 20 and 1000 employees with the payroll, benefits, and HR needs.

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