What Section 13(a)(3) actually says
The seasonal employee overtime exemption most resort operators are relying on is Section 13(a)(3) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it is narrower than its reputation.
It exempts from both minimum wage and overtime any employee employed by an establishment that is an amusement or recreational establishment, an organized camp, or a religious or non-profit educational conference center, if either of two tests is met. Test A: the establishment does not operate for more than seven months in any calendar year. Test B: during the preceding calendar year, its average receipts for any six months were not more than 33 1/3 percent of its average receipts for the other six months. The Wage and Hour Division's Fact Sheet #18 walks through both.
Two structural points before the traps.
First, this exemption turns on the character of the establishment, not on what any individual does. If the establishment qualifies, employees working there are exempt regardless of duties, which is why it sweeps in ski patrollers and line cooks alike. Federal courts have read it that way consistently.
Second, the exemption is federal only. Fact Sheet #18 says so directly: some state wage laws do not recognize or permit it, and an employer must comply with whichever provision, state or federal, is more protective. In Colorado and California that caveat is doing most of the work, and it is covered further down.
Four ways the receipts test gets misread
Test A counts operating months, not busy months. A ski area that runs a bike park in July, weddings in September, and a scenic gondola in August is operating in those months. Whether an establishment "operates" in a given month is a question of fact that depends on whether it operates as an amusement or recreational establishment; Fact Sheet #18 notes that an establishment doing only maintenance or ordering supplies in the off season is not considered to be operating. Off-season snowcat maintenance does not break your seven-month count. Selling lift-served mountain biking does.
Test B is not first half versus second half. Because the statute says "any six months," the comparison is between the monthly average of the six individual months with the smallest receipts and the monthly average of the six individual months with the largest, and those months need not be consecutive. Operators who run a calendar-half comparison get a different answer than the one that governs, sometimes in their favor and sometimes not.
Receipts belong to an establishment, and an establishment is a place. In opinion letter FLSA2021-3, the Wage and Hour Division concluded that an entity must have a distinct physical location for its recreational operations to be an "establishment," and that bona fide charitable donations are not receipts. A mobile guiding operation working on someone else's land is on much shakier ground than a fixed-base outfitter with a shop and a put-in.
Central functions are outside the exemption. Fact Sheet #18 states that employees of a central office, warehouse, garage, or commissary serving a chain of exempt amusement or recreational establishments are not covered by 13(a)(3). For a three-restaurant group with a shared prep kitchen and an office above one location, that is not a technicality. It is a live question about which of your employees are exempt and which are not, and the answer may be different for the prep cook than for the server twenty feet away.
The federal-land carve-out almost nobody reads
This is the piece that catches ski areas and park concessioners, and it is written into the statute itself.
Section 13(a)(3) ends with a proviso: the exemption from minimum wage and overtime does not apply to an employee of a private entity providing services or facilities in a national park, a national forest, or on National Wildlife Refuge System land under a contract with the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture. There is one exception inside the exception. A private entity providing services and facilities directly related to skiing keeps the minimum wage exemption, but not the overtime exemption.
Overtime for those employees is then governed by a separate provision, Section 13(b)(29), which is a partial exemption rather than a full one: overtime is owed at time and a half for hours over 56 in a workweek, not 40.
That set of rules reaches a lot of the operators reading this. Most major western ski areas run on Forest Service permits. Park concessioners in Grand Teton and Yellowstone operate under contracts with Interior. Guide services work under special use permits. Whether a given permit or concession contract is a "contract with the Secretary" for these purposes, and where the boundaries of your establishment sit, are exactly the questions that get litigated. In Chessin v. Keystone Resort Management, the Tenth Circuit had to decide whether Keystone and Arapahoe Basin were one establishment or two, and held that six miles of separation made them separate. That is the level of specificity this analysis operates at, and it is not something to settle from a blog post.
State overtime law does not care about your federal exemption
Colorado is the most aggressive of the four states TurnSeasons covers. Under the COMPS Order, employers must pay time and a half for hours past 40 per week, 12 per day, or any 12 consecutive hours, whichever produces the higher pay, and hours cannot be averaged across weeks. The state minimum wage is $15.16 an hour in 2026.
The ski carve-out is real but partial. Colorado exempts ski employees whose duties are directly related to downhill skiing or snowboarding, and those providing on-mountain food and beverage service, from the 40-hour overtime requirement only. Employees working in ski area lodging are not exempt at all. All of it is set out in the Division of Labor Standards and Statistics' INFO #1. Practically: a Summit County lift mechanic on a 14-hour storm day earns two hours of overtime under Colorado law even in a week where he works 38 hours total, and the federal seasonal exemption does nothing about it.
California stacks daily overtime on top of weekly. Under Wage Order 10, which governs the amusement and recreation industry, overtime is owed at time and a half over 8 hours in a workday and over 40 in a workweek, at double time over 12 hours in a workday, and on the seventh consecutive workday at time and a half for the first 8 hours and double time beyond that. The 2026 state minimum wage is $16.90.
Wage Order 10 also contains a ski-specific provision most operators have never read. An employer operating a ski establishment does not violate the order by instituting a regularly scheduled workweek of up to 48 hours during any month when Alpine or Nordic skiing is actually being conducted, including snowmaking and grooming, provided that employees receive time and a half for hours over 10 in a day or 48 in a workweek. That is a meaningful accommodation, and it is conditional on the schedule being regularly scheduled and on skiing activity actually taking place that month.
Nevada requires time and a half after 8 hours in a workday for employees earning less than one and a half times the state minimum wage, which is $18.00 against the $12.00 floor, unless the employee has mutually agreed to a scheduled four-day, ten-hour week. Employees above that rate get weekly overtime only. The rule lives at NRS 608.018.
Wyoming has no general state overtime statute for private employers, so the FLSA governs, and the Department of Workforce Services is the state contact.
If you operate around Lake Tahoe, read those last three together. A rental shop with staff at a west-shore resort in California and a second location in Incline Village, Nevada is running two different daily-overtime regimes inside one payroll, on two different minimum wages, with two different answers on tip credits.
Three more places the math breaks
Tipped wages
Federally, an employer may pay a cash wage of $2.13 an hour and take a tip credit of up to $5.12 against the $7.25 minimum, for employees who customarily and regularly receive more than $30 a month in tips, provided cash wages plus tips reach the minimum. Fact Sheet #15 has the mechanics.
The ground moved in 2024. The Fifth Circuit vacated the Department's 2021 tip credit rule, the one commonly called the 80/20/30 rule, holding it inconsistent with the statute; the Department subsequently withdrew the rule and updated its field guidance. What survives is the older 1967 dual-jobs regulation: an employee who works two genuinely distinct jobs for the same employer is a tipped employee only as to the tipped one. Litigation over the pre-2021 80/20 guidance has continued outside the Fifth Circuit, so treat this as unsettled rather than resolved.
State law diverges sharply. Colorado permits a tip credit of up to $3.02 an hour for employees regularly receiving at least $1.64 an hour in tips, which puts the 2026 statewide tipped cash wage at $12.14 and higher in jurisdictions with local minimums; Colorado also includes the tip credit taken, though not the tips themselves, in the regular rate for overtime. California and Nevada permit no tip credit. Full state minimum wage in cash, before a dollar of tips.
Travel and shuttle time
An ordinary home-to-work commute is not hours worked. But 29 CFR 785.38 says travel from job site to job site during the workday must be counted, and adds a sentence that operators should read twice: where an employee is required to report at a meeting place to receive instructions or to perform other work there, or to pick up and to carry tools, the travel from that designated place to the work place is part of the day's work and must be counted as hours worked regardless of contract, custom, or practice.
That describes a lot of seasonal operations. Guides who meet at the shop for a briefing and load boats before driving to the put-in. Staff who report to a base area to be shuttled to an on-mountain outpost. Trail crews staging at a yard. The 45-minute shuttle after a mandatory 6:30 a.m. meeting is not the same thing as a commute, and the Wage and Hour Division issued fresh opinion letters on commute and travel time in July 2026 that leave the underlying framework intact. Colorado's own definition of time worked follows a similar line, counting travel for employer benefit but not normal commuting.
Split shifts and dead time
California requires an extra hour's pay at minimum wage on any workday an employee works a split shift, with one exception directly relevant here: it does not apply when the employee resides at the place of employment. If you house staff on site, that carve-out may apply, and whether it does depends on the housing arrangement.
Wage Order 10 also mandates reporting time pay. An employee who reports and is furnished less than half the usual or scheduled day gets half the scheduled day, no less than two hours and no more than four; an employee required to report a second time in a day and given less than two hours of work gets two hours. The exceptions cover interruptions caused by an act of God or a cause outside the employer's control, which is where wind holds, power failures, and storm closures get argued rather than assumed. Violations carry $50 per underpaid employee per pay period for an initial violation and $100 for subsequent ones, on top of the wages owed.
And the gap in a split shift is not automatically unpaid. If staff are required to remain on premises or on duty during it, that is time worked in every state discussed here.
Where this post stops
Every question above is fact-dependent. Whether your establishment qualifies under either test, whether your permit is a contract with the Secretary, whether a given schedule is a split shift, whether an employee holds one job or two, whether your on-mountain kitchen is the same establishment as your base-area kitchen: none of that can be answered from the outside. This post describes what the rules say. It does not conclude anything about your operation, and a confident wrong answer here is the kind that produces two or three years of back wages.
The free first calls are worth making before the paid ones. The Wage and Hour Division runs a helpline at 1-866-4US-WAGE. Colorado's Division of Labor Standards and Statistics answers at 303-318-8441 and publishes plain-language INFO guidance on nearly all of the above. California's Labor Commissioner's Office and Nevada's Office of the Labor Commissioner both take employer questions. Then take the specific facts to employment counsel in your state, ideally in September rather than in February.
If you're building a winter roster now, what your job posting says about hours and housing is the document these rules will eventually be measured against. You can post seasonal roles on TurnSeasons or start from the town you're hiring in.