Overtime, breaks and nap-time pay: wage rules for childcare employers

Start with the assumption worth checking: that “teacher” means overtime-exempt.

The FLSA does contain a teacher exemption — under 29 CFR 541.303 it covers, among others, teachers of kindergarten or nursery school pupils — and the exemption carries no minimum salary test.

But it applies only when both halves hold: the employee’s primary duty is teaching, and they are employed in an “educational establishment.”

The second half is the catch.

Whether a child care center counts as an educational establishment depends on state law — the regulation counts nursery school programs as part of elementary education only “in some States” (29 CFR 541.204).

That single phrase is why the same job can be an exempt position in one state and a non-exempt one in another, and it is why many daycare teachers are not overtime-exempt at all.

Support roles are plainer.

Assistants, aides and floaters whose primary duty is not teaching are non-exempt employees — the exemption follows duties, not the title on the schedule.

A “lead teacher” label on a role that mainly supervises settles nothing; the duties decide.

Salary fits into the question differently for the white-collar exemptions — executive, administrative and professional, the route a director or office administrator would look at.

Those carry a salary floor of $684 per week, or $35,568 per year.

Courts vacated the 2024 increases to that level and DOL removed them from the CFR effective May 15, 2026, restoring $684 as the number.

On other pay calendars the same floor is $1,368 biweekly, $1,482 semimonthly, or $2,964 monthly (29 CFR 541.600).

The floor cuts both ways: a salaried director paid less than $684 per week must still be paid overtime — putting someone on a salary does not, by itself, settle anything.

The teacher exemption has no salary test, which leaves the duties and establishment tests to do the deciding. Before paying any classroom role on an exempt basis, take the primary-duty question and your state’s treatment of the educational-establishment test to the Department of Labor or employment counsel — a classification mistake is expensive to unwind after payroll has run.

Classification also sets the floor under everything else: non-exempt hours are paid at no less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for employers covered by the FLSA, and state minimums vary, with many set higher.

Federal law asks less about breaks than centers assume: the FLSA does not require meal or rest breaks for employees, and the states that mandate them add rules of their own on top.

So the federal question is not “how long a break must I give?” — it is “when can break time I do give go unpaid?”

Short breaks are the easy half.

Rest periods of short duration — running from 5 minutes to about 20 minutes — are hours worked under federal law (29 CFR 785.18), paid like any other time on the clock.

A coffee-length break does not come out of anyone’s pay.

Meals are where centers get caught.

A meal period can be unpaid only when the employee is completely relieved from duty for the purpose of eating a regular meal — ordinarily 30 minutes or more (29 CFR 785.19).

A teacher who eats with children while supervising them is working, so that lunch is a paid lunch.

In a classroom, “completely relieved” has a physical meaning: someone else is holding the room.

Whether your day even has a window where that is possible is a coverage question — the schedule that backfills a break is the scheduling problem, and the staffing detail for nap rooms specifically lives in our guide to nap-time ratios.

Nap-time pay follows the same principle. Quiet time is not automatically off the clock: a teacher keeping watch over a nap room is on duty — supervising sleeping children is work, and that window is hours worked.

The same rule reaches the off-the-clock habits that grow quietly around child care: the teacher who stays in the room through nap “voluntarily,” or finishes notes after the last pickup.

Under the FLSA, work not requested but suffered or permitted to be performed is work time that must be paid — if the center knows about it and allows it, it is hours worked.

Training time is paid time unless a narrow exception holds.

Under 29 CFR 785.27, attendance at lectures, meetings, training programs and similar activities need not be counted as working time only when all four of these are true:

• it is outside regular working hours;
• attendance is truly voluntary;
• the session is not directly related to the employee’s job; and
• the employee performs no productive work during it.

Miss any one of the four and the time is hours worked.

Required training fails the test on its face: state-mandated licensing training is generally paid work time, and “voluntary” has a federal definition — attendance is not voluntary if the employer requires it (29 CFR 785.28).

Mapped onto a center’s calendar: the pre-service orientation you require before a first solo shift, the annual refresher hours your state counts toward training, a first-aid or CPR recertification the role is required to hold, and the staff meetings you scheduled after close.

Each is required, so each is paid time — put it on the clock like classroom hours, and budget for it when you build the training calendar rather than discovering it on the time record.

Write the boundary down.

A short paragraph in your staff handbook — which training is required, which sessions are genuinely optional, and how paid training hours are recorded — does more for payroll consistency than any single paycheck, because it gives everyone the same answer before the question comes up.

State law is where break requirements live, since the FLSA requires none.

The Department of Labor keeps two tables worth checking.

Its table of state meal-period laws for adult employees in the private sector lists California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, plus Guam and Puerto Rico.

Its rest-period table lists paid rest-break requirements in California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington — Kentucky, for example, requires a paid 10-minute rest period during each 4-hour work period.

Treat the tables as a map, not the rule. The rest-period table was last revised January 1, 2023, and coverage and exemptions vary a lot from state to state — some requirements apply only to listed industries, and some state laws are narrow in who they cover.

Read your own state labor agency’s row rather than borrowing a neighboring state’s reading, and confirm with the agency before you change how meal breaks are recorded.

Two agencies, two halves of the question.

Your state labor agency — with the U.S. Department of Labor on the federal side — owns the wage questions: overtime status, minimum wage, and when meal and rest time is paid.

Your state child care licensing agency owns the staffing side: the rules that decide whether a room can spare a person at a given hour.

A break policy has to clear both — the labor agency decides whether the time is paid, and the licensing agency decides whether the room can release the person taking it.

This page is employer information, not licensing or legal advice. Wage, overtime and break rules come from the U.S. Department of Labor and your state labor agency, and the staffing rules that decide when a break can happen come from your state child care licensing agency — confirm the current requirements with them before you change how you pay your staff.