40Hours before overtime — weekly only, no daily triggerFLSA
$7.25Minimum wage — the federal floor, unchanged since 2009no state rate
2–3Year FLSA lookback on collective actions (3 if willful)29 U.S.C. §255
0State-mandated meal or rest breaks for adultsTexas law
Texas in short
Texas has almost no state wage-and-hour law of its own. Overtime is federal FLSA only — 1.5× the regular rate past 40 hours in a workweek, with no daily overtime and no double time. No Texas law requires meal or rest breaks for adult workers, and there is no state minimum wage above the federal $7.25 floor. There is also no Texas heat-illness standard for outdoor workers; since HB 2127 took effect in September 2023, cities can no longer fill that gap with their own mandatory water-break ordinances.
What Texas does enforce is the Texas Payday Law, which sets strict payment timing — non-exempt employees at least twice a month, exempt employees at least monthly — and gives the Texas Workforce Commission jurisdiction over wage claims. The practical exposure for a Texas contractor is therefore not break penalties but records: off-the-clock work, travel time, regular-rate miscalculation, and misclassification, all of which are decided by whoever can document the day more precisely.
Summary as of July 2026 — rules move; verify current requirements with the Texas labor department and qualified counsel. The California column is there for scale, not because it applies to you: it's the regime CDO's engine was built to, which is why Texas's rules run inside it with room to spare.
What Texas employers actually have to get right
Texas adds almost nothing on top of the FLSA: overtime is weekly-only past 40 hours, and no state law requires meal or rest breaks for adults. What Texas does enforce is the Texas Payday Law (Labor Code Ch. 61) — non-exempt workers paid at least twice a month, exempt workers at least monthly, with default paydays of the 1st and 15th if the employer never designates any. The Texas Workforce Commission takes the wage claims.
Simple rules don’t mean low stakes — they mean the fight moves to a different question. FLSA collective actions reach back two years, three if the violation was willful, and the claims that actually get filed against contractors are off-the-clock work, unpaid travel between sites, and regular-rate errors where a bonus wasn’t folded into the overtime rate. Every one of those turns on records. A GPS-verified, minute-level punch trail is what converts “he said, she said” into a closed file.
Heat is the place where Texas moved backwards from a compliance standpoint. HB 2127, effective September 2023 and upheld by the Third Court of Appeals in July 2025, broadly preempts local ordinances in fields covered by state law — which wiped out Austin’s and Dallas’s mandatory construction water-break rules. There is no Texas standard replacing them. What still applies is federal OSHA’s General Duty Clause, plus OSHA’s National Emphasis Program on heat, renewed in April 2026 through 2031 and explicitly targeting construction. In other words: the mandate went away, the liability didn’t.
Public works change the math again. Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and certified payroll apply on federally funded jobs, and Texas runs its own prevailing-wage statute (Gov’t Code Ch. 2258) for state and local public work. CDO tags prevailing-wage jobs at the punch level and keeps certified-payroll-ready records, so the classification and rate travel with the hours instead of being reconstructed at the end of the month.
And the Texas reality on the ground — big crews, long summers, Spanish-speaking workforces — is exactly what CDO’s field app was shaped for: designed for gloved hands in direct sun, bilingual by default, with records stored in both languages permanently.
The one most Texas contractors get wrong
Texas doesn’t require you to pay out unused vacation or PTO — until you put a policy in writing. Once a written policy or established practice promises a payout, the Texas Workforce Commission treats that promise as an enforceable wage under 40 TAC §821.25 and will order it paid on separation. Contractors regularly write a generous handbook policy, never budget for it, and discover the obligation when a crew turns over.
Wherever the rules land on the strictness scale, the constant is the same: disputes are decided by records. CDO's GPS-verified, minute-level, bilingual punch trail — reviewed by AI, with exceptions surfaced for human judgment — is the record that wins them. See why teams pick CDO →