About

This site tracks what a person on a payroll in the United States is actually owed, and whether the rule that decides it still binds today.

Why this needed making

A federal rule raising the salary at which an employee stops earning overtime was struck down by a court after employers had already budgeted for it. Both numbers are still on the internet, presented with equal confidence, and nothing on either page tells a reader which one a court left standing.

That is not an exception here, it is the shape of the whole subject. State rates change on 1 January and every article written in December keeps its old figures. Cities set floors above their own states, so the state number quoted in national roundups is the wrong number in dozens of places. A rule can be enacted and not yet in force, in force and then enjoined, or quietly superseded by an amendment nobody wrote about.

So every page has a date on it

Not the publication date. Not a "2026" in the headline. The day someone opened the statute or the state's own page and read the figure off it. When something could not be confirmed, the page says so rather than repeating a number from somewhere else and hoping.

That is the entire product. Anyone can list minimum wages. The hard part, and the part that decides whether a page is worth anything, is knowing whether the list is still true this week.

Where the numbers come from

The rule itself, or the body that enforces it: the statute, the Code of Federal Regulations, a state labor department, the US Department of Labor. Those links sit at the foot of every article and are tagged so you can see how much of a page rests on them.

In this field a figure travels from a payroll vendor's blog to a law firm's client alert to an HR software company's state guide until it is on forty sites and traceable to none. That chain is exactly where a threshold a court vacated keeps circulating as current law. Where an agency's own pages contradict each other, and they do, the article says so instead of quietly picking the more convenient one.

Who runs it

One person, working from outside the United States, who builds a payroll against a minimum wage that moves every year and reads these rules for the same reason you are. There is no newsroom here and no pretence of one, and no claim to have worked under the laws described. You will not find invented anecdotes. Where a page carries an opinion it is labelled as one and kept apart from the reporting. How the checking works is written out on How we check.

Nothing here is legal advice

This site reports what the rules say: who they cover, what the figures are, when they take effect, and whether a court has touched them. Whether a particular job is exempt, or what a particular employer owes a particular person, turns on facts about one workplace that no article can know. Those are questions for an employment lawyer or for the labor department of the state the work happens in.

How it pays for itself

Advertising, and eventually some affiliate links, which will be labeled on any page that carries them. They do not get to pick the recommendation. Where the cheaper route pays nothing and the expensive one pays well, the page still says which is cheaper.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or has gone out of date, please say so. A site that stakes everything on being current is only as good as the people who tell it when it slips. Contact.