2 APA's Top Payroll Questions & Answers for 2020 Daily or per-event rate for nonexempt employees Federal and State Wage-Hour Laws Q. We have events that are put on throughout the year. These typically involve setting up canvas tents as hotel rooms or a lobby area and sometimes with dining. We have a few employees hired through the whole summer to help manage the events that come up and they are paid an hourly wage. We also hire many employees just to assist for certain events if staffing was not planned appropriately. Typically, everyone is treated as a nonexempt employee and paid hourly because there's manual labor involved. Is it possible to pay a flat daily rate or even a per-event-worked rate, as opposed to keeping everyone at an hourly wage? What I have found seems to point me back to an hourly rate. A. It is permissible to pay a nonexempt employee a daily flat rate or a per‐event flat rate. One of our companies pays stagehands working theater shows on a per‐event basis. Here is where the hourly consideration you mentioned factors in. The employees need to clock in and out and you need to track hours worked, just as you would do with any other nonexempt employee. The corresponding hourly rate (the daily or flat amounts divided by the number of hours worked) must be at least equal to the applicable minimum wage; if not, you will need to pay an additional amount to bring the employee up to minimum wage. If the employee works more than 40 hours in a workweek, the employee will be due overtime pay based on the employee's regular rate of pay; it does not matter that you are compensating the employee on a per-event or per day rate. Note that nonexempt in this answer assumes it refers to an employee who is not exempt from the minimum wage and overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Although state law exemptions are often similar to or the same as FLSA exemptions, there are some notable exceptions. Many states have their own minimum wage laws, which are higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and overtime pay requirements that may be more generous than federal requirements. Your company must apply the federal or state standard that is more beneficial to the employee (see The Payroll Source®, §2.2). 10https://bookshelf.americanpayroll.org/payroll_source/