The minimum wage went to $17.00/hr on Long Island, and the salary line to stay overtime-exempt rose to $66,300. Here's where they tend to bite — with a quick checker you can use as you read.
Every year a number or two in New York's wage rules moves, and most of the time it's a non-event. 2026 is one of the years it isn't — at least if you run, negotiate, or just keep an eye on a school district's pay scales.
Two thresholds changed. On Long Island the minimum wage is now $17.00/hr. And the salary a role has to clear to stay overtime-exempt rose to $66,300/yr. Neither is dramatic on its own. The problem is where they land.
Where it hides
Most pay scales weren't built around these two numbers, so the exposure tends to sit exactly where nobody re-checks each year:
- The bottom of the hourly scales. Aide, monitor, cleaner, and food-service steps that were fine last year can slip under the new $17.00 floor — quietly, because nobody re-runs the bottom of the scale.
- Salaried staff just over the old line. A coordinator or 12-month administrator in the low $60Ks may now sit below the $66,300 exempt threshold. Under NY law that makes the role overtime-eligible — not the salaried-and-done arrangement everyone assumed.
The fastest way to see whether either touches a particular number is to just check it:
Reading your result
If a number comes back flagged, the next step depends on which one it is.
If a rate is below the floor, the usual move is compressing the bottom of that scale, or negotiating a floor bump at the next opener. The real question is how many steps it touches — and on which units.
If a salary is overtime-eligible, there are two paths: lift the salary above the threshold, or reclassify the role and start tracking hours. Which one fits depends on the role — and on what the contract already says.
This checker looks at one number at a time. A real schedule has dozens — across teachers, aides, clerical, custodial, and food service — and the compression and reclassification questions are schedule-wide. That's the part that's tedious by hand.
And it's not one-and-done
New York indexes the minimum wage to inflation starting in 2027, so the bottom of every scale is worth a quick look each year, not a one-time fix.