Professional Exemption

The key to the Professional exemption is that the employee must customarily and regularly exercise discretion and independent judgment.  The work must be “predominately intellectual and varied in character as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work.”   This exemption is meant to exempt individual employees rather than entire classes of employees.

 The Department of Labor Standards (“DLSE”) defines “Professional Employee” as follows:

Professional Employee means any employee whose duties and responsibilities meet the following criteria:

1. Who is licensed or certified by the State of California and is primarily engaged in the practice of one of the following recognized professions: law, medicine, dentistry, optometry, architecture, engineering, teaching, or accounting; or

2. Who is primarily engaged in an occupation commonly recognized as a learned or artistic profession. For the purposes of this subsection, “learned or artistic profession” means an employee who is primarily engaged in the performance of:

(i) Work requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field or science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a general academic education and from an apprenticeship, and from training in the performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes, or work that is an essential part of or necessarily incident to any of the above work; or

(ii) Work that is original and creative in character in a recognized field of artistic endeavor (as opposed to work which can be produced by a person

endowed with general manual or intellectual ability and training), and the result of which depends primarily on the invention, imagination, or talent of the employee or work that is an essential part of or necessarily incident to any of the above work; and

(iii) Whose work is predominantly intellectual and varied in character (as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work) and is of such character that the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time.

3. Who customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment in the performance of duties set forth above.

4. Who earns a monthly salary equivalent to no less than two times the state minimum wage for full-time employment.

If you believe that you are not being paid for all of the time you have worked or that you are not being paid overtime that you are due, please fill out our online consultation form.