No Texas statute requires a private employer to pay overtime. There is no Texas overtime count to plead alongside a federal claim, and no state damages multiplier to stack on top — which means the federal Fair Labor Standards Act is not just the main remedy in Texas, it is the only one. That single fact decides the shape of every Texas overtime case: one statute, one set of exemptions, one limitations period, one measure of damages.
This is also the office's home state. The firm is based in Dallas and brings these cases in the Texas federal courts itself.
The FLSA requires one and one-half times your regular rate for every hour over 40 in a single workweek. Four points matter more than the rest.
Your regular rate is not your base rate. It includes most non-discretionary bonuses, shift differentials, per-job and per-foot pay and production incentives. Leaving a non-discretionary bonus out of the regular rate understates every overtime hour you worked in that week, and that undercount is itself the violation.
Liquidated damages double the back pay. The FLSA's default remedy is the unpaid overtime plus an equal additional amount as liquidated damages. An employer avoids the doubling only by proving good faith and reasonable grounds for believing it was complying.
The employer pays the attorney's fees if you win. A prevailing plaintiff's reasonable fees and costs are the employer's to pay, on top of your back wages.
The period is two years, three if the violation was willful. Each workweek is its own violation, so the period reaches back from the day the claim is filed.
The Texas Minimum Wage Act contains no overtime provision, and it does not apply to a person covered by the FLSA. The Texas Payday Law is a different kind of statute — an administrative route for recovering wages an employer agreed to pay and then did not. It is a wage-payment remedy, not an overtime statute, and it does not create a right to a premium for hours over 40. So when a Texas worker's question is overtime, the answer is federal.
Compare that to the states with their own overtime acts. The New Mexico Minimum Wage Act adds twice the unpaid wages on top of the unpaid wages themselves. The Illinois Minimum Wage Law allows treble the underpayments plus five percent of the underpayment for each month it goes unpaid. Texas has none of those levers. It is better to know that at the start than to find it out later.
The firm has litigated FLSA overtime collective actions in the Texas federal courts and has obtained certification over opposition.
Snively & Clark v. Peak Pressure Control, LLC & Nine Energy Service, LLC, Western District of Texas. The court conditionally certified an FLSA collective of pressure control operators in February 2016. Two years later the defendants moved to decertify the collective at stage two and the court refused, with roughly 70 plaintiffs then in the case: "the Court finds Plaintiffs share similar factual and employment settings and are similarly situated, Defendants' defenses are more collective than individual, and collective resolution is fair and efficient. Accordingly, the Court DENIES Defendants' Motion for Decertification." On the choice the employer was asking the court to make, the order was blunter still — it would "rather proceed with a potentially difficult collective trial than to decapitate the hydra and watch as the single trial sprouts into 70 potential mini-trials."
Jackson v. Superior HealthPlan, Inc. & Centene Company of Texas, L.P., Northern District of Texas. The court conditionally certified a collective of salaried Service Coordinators in November 2016. The employer opposed the motion, filed controverting declarations from other employees and pressed for a more stringent standard. The court applied the step-one standard anyway — "Because only minimal evidence is required, a court makes its determination using a fairly lenient standard and usually grants conditional certification" — and declined to weigh the employer's own declarations, holding that it is "improper at the initial notice stage to extend the analysis and 'perform a detailed review of individualized facts from employees hand-picked [by Defendants].'" Salaried case management and utilization review work is a practice area of its own; what the exemption fight looks like for those workers is set out on our page for Texas case managers and utilization review nurses.
The firm's larger Texas body of work is in the oil patch, where federal courts in the Western, Northern and Southern Districts of Texas have conditionally certified FLSA collectives under 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) for casing crews, field hands, crew pushers, pump hands, operators and MWD operators. The pay structures in those orders are the ones the regular-rate rules govern: pay per foot of pipe laid, pay per job, piece rate, per diem, day rate, salary, and non-discretionary bonuses left out of the overtime calculation. Most of those certifications were entered on the parties' joint stipulation. Three were litigated to a contested ruling, and those three are the ones worth reading.
In Minyard v. Double D Tong, Inc., Western District of Texas, the court first granted certification only as to Field Hands and Crew Pushers, finding that "Plaintiffs are similarly situated to Field Hands and Crew Pushers with respect to their job duties and pay provisions" while declining to certify all casing employees. On reconsideration the court widened it back out, holding that "[b]ecause the dissimilar job responsibilities among the class have not been shown to be relevant to Plaintiffs' FLSA allegations, they are not a barrier to conditional certification," and amended the class definition to reach all non-exempt casing workers "who received (1) pay on a quantity of work performed (whether pay per foot, …)."
In Fulton v. Bayou Well Services, LLC, Northern District of Texas, the court certified a class of "current and former hourly paid employees who received non-discretionary bonus or 'non-revenue' pay" — the regular-rate theory, not a misclassification theory — and in the same order denied the employer's motion to dismiss.
In Moreno v. Silvertip Completion Services Operating, LLC, Western District of Texas, the court conditionally certified "[a]ll workers employed by Defendant in the United States in the last three years who were paid on a non-exempt basis and received Additional Pay that Defendant excluded from the regular rate to calculate overtime," and rejected the employer's attempt to cut the class period to two years, noting that "Defendant provided no case law for this proposition."
Every one of those orders certified a collective under the FLSA alone. None of them certified a claim under a Texas wage statute, because no Texas statute requires a private employer to pay overtime.
Jack Siegel has filed more than 100 federal overtime lawsuits in 25 federal districts across 20 states and obtained 50+ class and collective certifications in 19 federal judicial districts across 14 states, as lead counsel on the firm's cases. The firm has recovered more than $100 million for workers, and it has never represented an employer in a wage case.
Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. These are results in other people's cases. Each case is decided on its own facts, its own record and its own procedural posture. Conditional certification and class certification are procedural rulings about whether a case may proceed as a group action; they are not findings of liability and they are not an award of money. This website contains attorney advertising.
Texas sits in the Fifth Circuit, and since 2021 the Fifth Circuit has not used the two-step conditional-certification process most other circuits use. Under Swales v. KLLM Transport Services, L.L.C., a district court identifies what facts and legal considerations are material to the threshold "similarly situated" question, authorizes preliminary discovery on those points, and then decides the scope of the collective once — rather than granting a lenient first-stage notice and revisiting it later on a decertification motion. Swales is the governing law of the circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
In practice that front-loads the work. The record that would have supported a lenient first-stage motion elsewhere has to be built before the certification question is decided in Texas. The firm's own Texas certifications in Snively and Jackson were entered in 2016 under the two-step approach then in force, the Snively decertification denial came in 2018, and the oilfield orders described above were entered between 2016 and 2020 — all before or outside the framework Swales put in place.
No. No Texas statute requires a private employer to pay overtime. The Texas Minimum Wage Act contains no overtime provision and does not apply to a person covered by the FLSA, and the Texas Payday Law covers wages promised but unpaid rather than overtime premiums. Your overtime claim in Texas is a federal claim.
Yes, often. A salary is a method of payment, not an exemption. To be exempt an employer must show both that you are paid on a salary basis at or above the federal threshold and that your actual job duties fit a specific exemption — executive, administrative, professional, outside sales or computer. The federal salary threshold is $684 per week, or about $35,568 a year. Clearing it is necessary but never sufficient; the duties test is where most misclassification cases are actually won or lost.
The unpaid overtime premium, plus an equal amount again as liquidated damages, plus your attorney's fees and costs from the employer if you prevail. The recovery period runs two years back from filing, or three if the violation was willful, with each workweek counted as its own violation.
The FLSA makes it unlawful to discharge or discriminate against an employee for filing a complaint, testifying, or causing a proceeding to be instituted under the Act, and that protection covers internal complaints as well as agency ones. Remedies for retaliation include reinstatement, lost wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages.
The FLSA is federal and applies wherever you perform the work, so working in Texas for an out-of-state employer does not change your federal overtime rights. What changes is whether there is a second claim available. Because no Texas statute requires a private employer to pay overtime, a Texas-based worker has the federal claim alone. Workers in states that do have one — New Mexico, Illinois and New York among them — can often plead a state wage claim alongside the FLSA, with that state's own limitations period and damages.
These cases are handled on a contingency fee. The firm advances case costs and they are repaid from any recovery. No recovery, no fee and no costs. Free consultation.
Overtime is federal in Texas, so the agency is federal. The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division enforces the FLSA and takes complaints at no cost. Filing with the agency is an alternative to a private suit, not a prerequisite for one.
Attorney responsible: Jack L. Siegel, Dallas, Texas.
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Attorney advertising. Jack L. Siegel of Siegel Law Group PLLC, Dallas, Texas, is responsible for this content.
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