How overtime works in Minnesota

This guide assumes you already know the federal baseline: the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets a nationwide floor of time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a workweek, with no federal daily trigger. If you need that baseline first, see the federal FLSA overtime guide — it is not repeated here. Everything below is what Minnesota adds on top of that floor, and — more importantly for Minnesota — exactly where it stops being the operative rule.

Minnesota’s own overtime rule comes from the Minnesota Fair Labor Standards Act, Minn. Stat. § 177.25, administered by the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry (DLI). Subdivision 1 sets a weekly threshold of 48 hours, not 40 — a number that, read on its own, looks like Minnesota asking for less protection than the federal floor already requires. For the large majority of Minnesota employment, it doesn’t actually change anything. Read on for exactly why.

Minn. Stat. § 177.25, subdivision 1 states: “No employer may employ an employee for a workweek longer than 48 hours, unless the employee receives compensation for employment in excess of 48 hours in a workweek at a rate of at least 1-1/2 times the regular rate at which the employee is employed.” Read in isolation, that sentence looks like a standalone Minnesota overtime rule sitting next to the federal one — and, unlike some other states’ overtime statutes, § 177.25 does not itself contain a general carve-out for employment the FLSA already covers. Its own built-in exceptions are narrower: an employee working under an agreement meeting the requirements of section 7(b)(2) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended, or a sugar-beet hand laborer paid a qualifying piece rate.

What actually keeps the 48-hour number from mattering for most Minnesota employees is a different mechanism: the FLSA is a floor, not a ceiling, and its own savings clause preserves a state or local law only where it sets a higher minimum wage or a lowermaximum workweek than the federal one — never a law that would let an employer work someone longer before overtime attaches. A state threshold set above 40 hours cannot be used to excuse an employer from the federal 40-hour rule for any employment the FLSA already reaches. Minnesota’s own DLI confirms exactly this in its published guidance: most Minnesota businesses are subject to the federal FLSA’s 40-hour rule, and “the federal requirement (40 hours) is typically more favorable to employees than Minnesota’s state requirement” of 48 hours.

That gap is still worth tracking precisely, not waving away. A differing statutory threshold doesn’t stop being a real rule just because the federal floor is tighter for most employers — it is the operative overtime rule for whichever employment relationships genuinely fall outside the FLSA’s coverage, and it has to be applied correctly there rather than assumed away. This guide does not attempt to define which employers or employees fall outside FLSA coverage — that determination turns on the federal statute’s own coverage tests, not on anything Minnesota law adds — only what happens once that determination has been made.

§ 177.25 carves out a few more categories beyond the general FLSA-preemption principle above. None of these is a general-purpose exemption — each is conditional on the category and terms stated:

Take two nonexempt employees, each paid $20.00/hour, each working an identical 47-hour week — the only difference is which employer they work for, and whether that employment is covered by the FLSA:

Had Employee B instead worked 49.0 hoursin the week — 1.0 hour past Minnesota’s threshold — Minn. Stat. § 177.25, subd. 1 would then require 1.5× pay for that excess hour: 48.0 hours at $20.00 ($960.00) plus 1.0 hour at $30.00 ($30.00), for $990.00 total. The 48-hour line only starts to matter once an employee not covered by the FLSA actually crosses it — nothing changes for Employee A’s situation either way, because the federal 40-hour rule already governs that employment regardless of what Minnesota’s own threshold is set to.

A rule that only switches on for the narrower band of employment the federal law doesn’t already reach is exactly the kind of scope condition that gets flattened into a blanket assumption when it’s worked out by hand. In A Tick models Minnesota’s rule as a configured region rule keyed to the FLSA-coverage boundary you set for a role, rather than a single fixed 48-hour or 40-hour switch, and its overtime calculation engine applies the correct threshold to the actual clock times logged for the week, deterministically, so the same timesheet always produces the same result. Pay is never left to guesswork or to AI.

What In A Tick enforces regardless of which threshold governs a given role: accurate capture of the hours actually worked from real clock times, a complete audit trail of how every figure was reached, and a deterministic, payroll-ready calculation you can hand to whoever runs pay.