How do Ohio wage, overtime and meal break laws work in 2026?

The tipped rule is the one to watch on payroll. Your cash obligation is $5.50 per hour, but you carry the top-up: if a tipped employee's pay period comes in below $11 an hour once tips are counted, you make up the difference. The Ohio Department of Commerce, Bureau of Wage and Hour puts the burden of proof on the employer, not the worker.

Because the $11 rate is constitutional and CPI-indexed, it's stable to plan around but not fixed. Budget for a small rise each January rather than treating this year's number as permanent. Check the updated rate each year via the Bureau of Wage and Hour before your first January payroll run. The right time to review Ohio state payroll tax and UI rates is the same January cycle.

The $150,000 coverage floor rarely lets an employer off the hook in practice. A business under that threshold can still owe overtime under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act on individual coverage grounds, for example any employee who handles goods moving in interstate commerce. The safe assumption for a Teamed-employed worker is that the federal 40-hour week applies regardless. See how Ohio compares with Michigan's overtime rules, which follow the same federal-only framework. For more on how Ohio pays departing employees, the Ohio termination and at-will guide covers final-pay timing.

Ohio gives you more flexibility here than most states. You're free to set your own break policy for adult staff; you don't have to schedule or pay for meal or rest breaks at all. Where you do offer a short rest break, the US DOL Wage and Hour guidance treats breaks under 20 minutes as paid time worked, so a five or ten-minute pause still counts toward the 40-hour week. Factor that into your overtime tracking. For context on how Ohio's break rules interact with paid leave obligations, see the Ohio paid leave and sick leave guide.

For minors the rule is firm: a 30-minute break once an under-18 employee passes 5 consecutive hours, alongside Ohio's separate limits on hours and times of day for school-age workers. Most employers apply one written break policy to everyone, which keeps the minor rule satisfied by default and avoids a separate minor-hours tracking layer.

A standard week in Ohio is 40 hours, and anything above that for a non-exempt worker is overtime at 1.5 times pay. Misclassifying a salaried worker as exempt is the expensive error: if the $684-a-week salary basis or the duties test is not met, every over-40-hour week becomes back-pay, regardless of the job title on the contract. The FLSA Handy Reference Guide walks through each duties test in plain language. On US hiring broadly, the same salary-basis test applies in every state, but Ohio adds no local exemption layer on top.

Federal Social Security, Medicare and FUTA sit on top of the state picture. On wage and hour, the $684 salary line and the 40-hour week are the two numbers that decide whether a hire is owed overtime. Get those right and Ohio is a clean state to run. If exemption classification is the question on a specific hire, use the Employer Cost Calculator to see the full loaded cost before you set the title and the salary.

Real HR and legal experts handle your Ohio hires and know the CPI-indexed $11 minimum, the tipped top-up to $11, and the federal $684 salary line. An actual person, not a chatbot or a pooled queue. Overtime and exemption testing are computed and pass through at cost, itemised and auditable on every invoice.

Contractor onboarding, EOR payroll, and entity graduation all live on one platform: an Ohio contractor who converts to W-2 keeps their record, and that same employee can graduate to your own US entity when the model no longer fits, without switching systems. Use the Crossover Calculator to see the month the model flips. EOR is the right call for Ohio, until it isn't. If you want the full cost picture first, the Employer Cost Calculator shows every line. Questions? Talk to an expert.