If you’re a salaried store manager, administrative assistant, or other “white collar” employee, chances are your employer doesn’t pay you overtime—no matter how many hours you work in a given week. But new federal rules that take effect this December will force employers to start paying overtime to millions more salaried white collar workers. Will you be one of them?

Federal law requires that most employees get paid at time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours in a given week. And contrary to what employers may say, this includes salaried employees. However, certain salaried white collar employees—those whose job duties fit the federal definitions of “executive,” “administrative,” “professional,” “computer,” or “outside sales” employees—are exempt from having to be paid overtime if their salaries exceed a specified minimum exemption amount.

For executive, administrative, and professional employees, that salary level is a mere $455 per week, or $23,660 per year. So an employer must provide overtime pay to a salaried secretary or store manager who earns $23,659 per year, but not one with the same job duties who earns $23,661—just $2 more.

Employers have long taken advantage of this low exemption amount to get millions of hours of free labor out of employees by simply putting them on salary and, often, “promoting” them to a position with “manager” in the title.

But new federal overtime regulations that take effect December 1, 2016 will change that by more than doubling the overtime exemption threshold for executive, administrative, and professional employees to $913 per week, or $47,476 per year. This simple change will make more than 4.2 million new employees eligible for overtime in the policy’s first year alone.

Nearly 400,000 of these newly eligible employees will be in California—more than in any other state.

Moreover, the exemption amount will now automatically increase every three years to keep up with inflation—a commonsense policy that wasn’t adopted when the exemption amount was last updated in 2004. Since then, inflation has steadily eroded the value of every dollar an employee earns. For example, an item purchased for $23,660 in 2004 would cost over $30,000 today due to inflation. 

So the new overtime exemption threshold of $913 per week or $47,476 annually does more than just catch up with inflation: It represents a long-overdue increase in the standard of living for millions of white collar workers whose employers have gotten away with not paying them for overtime for far too long.

“This change is long overdue,” says wage and hour attorney Eric Grover of Keller Grover LLP. “The increase to the weekly rate will provide hundreds of thousands of hard-working California men and women a fairer wage for the work they perform.”