What Home-Based Care Providers Need To Do To Comply With DOL’s Overtime Rule
Home Health Care News / By Joyce Famakinwa
Last month, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) unveiled its final overtime rule, which is set to go into effect this summer. The rule increases a minimum salary threshold for millions of workers across the country, and could impact home health and home care providers.
Broadly, the DOL has increased the salary threshold for the minimum compensation necessary for an individual to be exempt from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
“For federal purposes, that minimum salary threshold will increase as of July 1 of this year, and then increase again at the beginning of 2025, and then continue to increase every three years, so that the salary threshold doesn’t become out of date with actual compensation,” Angelo Spinola, the home health, home care and hospice chair at the law firm Polsinelli, told Home Health Care News.
Specifically, the salary threshold will rise to the equivalent of an annual salary of $43,888, and will increase to $58,656 on Jan. 1.
Currently, the annual salary threshold is $35,568.
“This rule will restore the promise to workers that if you work more than 40 hours in a week, you should be paid more for that time,” Julie Su, acting secretary of labor, said in a press statement. “Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts, but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay. That is unacceptable.”
Once it begins, the rule could impact both home care and home health providers in a variety of ways.
“For office staff that typically are not compensated all that highly, the new salary level may result in a requirement to increase their salaries, or to move them to non-exempt status and pay them overtime,” Spinola said. “I am expecting to see a lot of reclassification.”
For home health providers, the rule also means that clinicians who are paid per visit may need their rates adjusted to align with the new minimum salary equivalent. Providers that aren’t paying high enough visit rates run the risk of clinicians’ being found to be misclassified as exempt.
On the flip side, the rule’s impact is very dependent on what is going on at each individual company. Some providers might see any effect at all, according to William A. Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC).
“That could mean at some health care companies, they have everybody above the minimum salary level to begin with and will continue to be above that on January 1 of 2025, and nothing then occurs as an impact,” he told HHCN.
Though there’s a possibility that some companies will see no impact at all, Dombi doubts that this will be the case for the majority of providers…
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