© 2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Massachusetts Wage & Hour Peculiarities, 2025 ed. | 79 c. Professional Exemption There are three types of professionals that are exempted from overtime under the FLSA: learned professionals, creative professionals, and computer professionals. Massachusetts has adopted both the learned and the creative professional exemptions, but neither the Massachusetts legislature nor the courts have addressed the computer professional exemption. (1) Learned Professional Exemption To qualify for the learned professional exemption, an employee must meet all of the following requirements: Effective January 1, 2020, the employee must be compensated on a salary basis at a rate not less than $684.00 per week. The 2024 DOL Final Rule proposed to increase this threshold to $844 per week as of July 1, 2024 and to $1,128 per week as of January 1, 2025, but the rule is enjoined as of the date of publication. The employee’s primary duty448 must be the performance of work requiring advanced knowledge, defined as work which is predominantly intellectual in character. The advanced knowledge must be in a field of science or learning. The advanced knowledge must be customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.449 (a) Work Requiring Advanced Knowledge To qualify for the learned professional exemption, an employee’s primary duty must be the performance of “work requiring advanced knowledge,” meaning work that is predominantly intellectual in character and that requires the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment, as distinguished from the performance of routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work.450 The discretion required to meet the professional exemption is a “less stringent” standard than the discretion required under the administrative exemption.451 A professional employee generally uses advanced knowledge (typically attained through a formal academic program) to analyze, interpret, or make deductions from varying facts or circumstances.452 For purposes of the exemption, advanced knowledge cannot be attained at the high school level.453 448 The definition of the term “primary duty” is discussed supra note 370. 449 29 C.F.R. § 541.300. 450 29 C.F.R. § 541.301(b). 451 Crowe v. Examworks, Inc., 136 F. Supp. 3d 16, 30 & n.10 (D. Mass. 2015). 452 Id. at 30. 453 29 C.F.R. § 541.301(b).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTkwMTQ4