The 40-hour, Monday-through-Friday workweek has anchored American employment law for nearly a century. Today, that anchor is being tested from several directions at once. Lawmakers are debating shorter standard workweeks, cities and states are regulating how and when schedules may be set, and employers experimenting with compressed or flexible schedules are discovering that innovation does not suspend wage-and-hour law. For employers, the workweek is no longer just a payroll convention; it is an active area of compliance risk.
The Federal Baseline: The FLSA Still Sets the Floor
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) remains the foundation. Non-exempt employees must receive overtime at one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, defined as any fixed and regularly recurring period of seven consecutive 24-hour days. The workweek need not match the calendar week, but once established, it cannot be manipulated to avoid overtime.
Employees may be exempt from overtime if they satisfy both a duties test and a salary threshold. After several years of litigation and regulatory back-and-forth, the U.S. Department of Labor in May 2026 formally restored the 2019 salary levels, leaving the federal threshold at $684 per week ($35,568 annually). Employers should not assume that is the end of the story: many states impose significantly higher thresholds, and several raised them again effective January 1, 2026. Multistate employers must satisfy whichever standard is more protective of the employee.
The Push for a Shorter Workweek
The most visible challenge to the traditional workweek is the four-day workweek movement. At the federal level, the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would amend the FLSA to reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 for non-exempt employees, with overtime owed beyond that point. The bill has not advanced, but it reflects genuine momentum: several states have introduced legislation or created task forces to study shorter workweeks, and private-sector pilot programs continue to report favorable results on retention and productivity.
Employers do not need to wait for legislation to offer a four-day schedule, but they do need to structure it carefully. A compressed schedule of four 10-hour days keeps a non-exempt employee at 40 hours, so no federal overtime is triggered; however, a handful of states, including California, require daily overtime after eight hours unless a valid alternative workweek arrangement is properly adopted. A true 32-hour week raises different questions, including the treatment of exempt employees’ salaries, benefits eligibility tied to hours, and the handling of holiday weeks.
Fair Workweek and Predictive Scheduling Laws
A second trend regulates not how long employees work, but how predictably. So-called fair workweek or predictive scheduling laws generally require covered employers, typically in retail, fast food, and hospitality, to provide advance written schedules (commonly 7 to 14 days), pay premiums for last-minute changes, offer additional hours to existing part-time staff before hiring, and avoid “clopening” shifts (where an employee works a closing shift late at night and returns the next day for an early shift) without consent and extra pay.
Oregon remains the only state with a statewide law, but the list of cities is growing and now includes New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, most recently, unincorporated Los Angeles County. Penalties are real: in New York City, violations of the Fair Workweek Law can draw escalating civil penalties for repeat offenses, in addition to schedule-change premiums owed to employees.
New York as a Case Study in State-Law Layering
New York illustrates how much state law adds on top of the FLSA. New York’s spread-of-hours rule requires an extra hour of pay at minimum wage when an employee’s workday spans more than ten hours. The Labor Law’s day-of-rest provision entitles many employees to 24 consecutive hours of rest each calendar week. Frequency-of-pay rules require that manual workers be paid weekly, an obligation that has generated significant litigation in recent years. And within New York City, the Fair Workweek Law imposes detailed scheduling obligations on fast food and retail employers, including 14 days’ advance notice of schedules for fast food workers. An employer who looks only to federal law will miss most of these requirements.
Remote Work Complicates Everything
Hybrid and remote arrangements add another layer. Employers remain responsible for tracking all hours worked by non-exempt employees, including after-hours emails and off-the-clock tasks performed at home. Remote employees are also generally subject to the wage-and-hour laws of the state where they perform the work, which means a New York company with a remote employee in Washington or Colorado may have obligations it has never had to consider.
Takeaway
The workweek is being reshaped by legislation, local ordinances, and employee expectations, but the compliance fundamentals have not changed: know which laws apply to each employee based on location and industry, classify employees correctly under both federal and state tests, and structure any alternative schedule with overtime, scheduling, and notice requirements in mind. Employers considering four-day weeks, flexible scheduling, or operations in fair workweek jurisdictions should review their policies, timekeeping practices, and handbooks before making changes, not after a complaint arrives.