Seasonal Workers and Overtime: How the FLSA Exemption for Amusement Parks, Camps, and Ski Resorts Works

Picture the busiest Saturday of your peak season. Your ride operators, lifeguards, line cooks, or lift crew have each logged 55 hours by Sunday night, and payroll runs Monday morning. Do you owe every one of them 15 hours of time-and-a-half?

If your business is a seasonal amusement or recreational establishment that satisfies one of two federal tests, the answer under the Fair Labor Standards Act may be no overtime at all — and not even the federal minimum wage. Get the tests wrong, though, and that same payroll becomes back wages plus an equal amount in liquidated damages, effectively double, stretching back two or three years. This guide walks through who qualifies, how each test works, the five mistakes that cost operators the exemption, and a pre-season checklist to run before your next hiring wave.

What Section 13(a)(3) Actually Excuses​

Section 13(a)(3) of the FLSA exempts from the federal minimum wage and overtime requirements any employee employed by an amusement or recreational establishment — a category that also sweeps in organized camps and religious or nonprofit educational conference centers — provided the establishment is genuinely seasonal under one of the two tests below.

Note what the exemption does not touch:

• State wage laws. You must comply with whichever standard, state or federal, is most protective of the worker. Several states do not recognize a parallel seasonal exemption at all, which makes the federal analysis moot inside their borders.
• Child labor rules. Federal limits on the hours and jobs of 14- and 15-year-olds apply in full to amusement parks and recreation establishments.
• Recordkeeping. The paperwork burden shrinks for exempt employers but does not disappear.
• Everyone off-site. Staff at a central office, warehouse, garage, or commissary serving your locations are not employed by the exempt establishment.

The stakes scale with the seasonal workforce. July is the annual peak in youth employment — 53.8 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were employed in July 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and leisure and hospitality remains the top employer of young workers, with about 5.36 million workers aged 16 to 24 on payrolls in July 2025. A single misclassified crew of 60 summer hires working 50-hour weeks can generate five figures of liability in one season.

Test 1: The 7-Month Operations Test​

The simpler path: your establishment does not operate for more than seven months in any calendar year.

The key word is operates, and the Labor Department reads it as operating as an amusement or recreational establishment. Whether you operated in a given month is a question of fact. Off-season months spent only on maintenance operations or ordering supplies do not count — winterizing the slides, repainting the lodge, and stocking the pro shop in March do not tick the clock.

Two scenarios show where operators get tripped up:

• A water park open Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day operates as a recreational establishment from roughly June through August, plus a few days on either end. Even counting the shoulder months whole, it lands around five months — comfortably inside the limit.
• A ski resort running lifts December through April is fine at five months. Add a June-through-September mountain-bike park plus October sightseeing weekends, and the same hill now operates as a recreational establishment in nine calendar months. Test 1 is gone, and only the receipts test can save the exemption.

Count months, not days, and treat any month the gates are open to the public in a recreational capacity as an operating month — a single preview weekend in an otherwise dark month still puts that month in play.

Test 2: The 33-1/3 Percent Receipts Test​

If you operate more than seven months, you can still qualify on seasonality of revenue: during the preceding calendar year, your average receipts for any six months must be not more than 33-1/3 percent of your average receipts for the other six months.

Three details matter:

1. Any six months — not consecutive. Rank all twelve months by receipts. Compare the average of the six smallest months against the average of the six largest months.
2. It runs on last year's books. A new business with no preceding calendar year cannot use this test and must satisfy the 7-month test instead.
3. There is a shortcut. The math is equivalent to requiring at least 75 percent of the year's receipts to fall in the top six months. If your off-season six months contribute more than a quarter of annual revenue, you fail.

The Labor Department's own illustration makes the arithmetic concrete: an establishment open nine months took in $260,000 across its six biggest months (May through October, averaging $43,333) and $75,000 across the other six (averaging $12,500). Because $12,500 is less than one-third of $43,333, the exemption applied.

Run this calculation every January, because the test floats with last year's results. One strong off-season — a warm winter that keeps the campground full, a viral video that fills the spring — can flip a qualifying business into overtime territory for the entire current year.

Public operators face an extra wrinkle: for a publicly run establishment, receipts means admission fees, so a parks department whose operating costs are met mostly from tax funds fails this test by definition.

Who Counts as Employed by the Establishment​

The exemption runs with the establishment, not the company. Under the regulations, an establishment is a distinct physical place of business — so a company running three water parks tests each park separately. One year-round flagship does not drag its seasonal siblings out of the exemption, but it cannot borrow their status either.

Two more boundary lines from the fact sheet:

• Concessionaires usually merge with the host. The food stand inside your park is typically part of the same establishment, so the tests run on combined operations and the stand's workers share the exemption.
• Central functions stay outside. Employees of a central office, warehouse, garage, or commissary serving a chain of exempt establishments are not covered — your headquarters bookkeeper closing the books for all three parks is owed overtime even when every ride operator is exempt.

That last point deserves a second look at hiring time: the same payroll run can lawfully contain straight-time seasonal crew and overtime-eligible support staff side by side, and your timekeeping system needs to know which is which.

Five Mistakes That Cost Operators the Exemption​

1. Assuming the federal exemption overrides state law​

It never does. Where state law is stricter, state law wins — and several states simply have no counterpart to Section 13(a)(3). New York, for example, has no state provision paralleling the federal seasonal exemption, so a seasonal operator there owes state overtime regardless of the federal analysis. Connecticut takes a middle path, exempting only certain seasonal roles such as camp counselors from its minimum wage. Check your state's position before you check anything else; it can end the inquiry.

2. Forgetting that teen hour limits still apply​

The wage exemption does not suspend a single child labor rule, and seasonal crews skew young. For 14- and 15-year-olds, federal law caps work at 3 hours on a school day and 18 hours in a school week, rising to 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week when school is out, all between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. — extended to 9 p.m. from June 1 through Labor Day. Children under 14 generally cannot work in covered non-agricultural jobs at all. Schedule a 15-year-old for a 50-hour holiday week and the overtime exemption will not save you from the hours violation.

3. Keeping no time records because "we're exempt"​

The reduced recordkeeping rule for 13(a)(3) employers requires only basic identifying records — name, address, birth date for workers under 19, and sex and occupation. Daily hours logs are technically optional. Treat that as a trap, not a permission slip: if an investigator later finds you failed a test, the missing hours do not create a defense — courts let workers' reasonable estimates of their hours fill the gap, and those estimates are rarely conservative. Keep daily time records for every seasonal worker exactly as if the exemption might disappear, because in any given year, it might.

4. Testing the company instead of each location​

Operators with multiple sites routinely run one company-wide receipts test and call it done. The statute tests each establishment, so blending the flagship's year-round revenue into a seasonal park's books may talk you out of an exemption you actually hold — or worse, blending a seasonal site's numbers into headquarters may fool you into thinking the office staff are covered too. Keep receipts and operating calendars site by site.

5. Letting the season creep, then never re-testing​

The exemption is re-earned every year. A ski hill adds summer operations, a water park adds a holiday lights drive-through, a camp adds spring-break sessions — each extension inches toward an eighth operating month or fattens the off-season receipts past the 25 percent line. Calendar a January review: count last year's operating months, run the six-and-six receipts math, and confirm the coming season's schedule still fits before the first offer letter goes out.

One More Wrinkle: The New No-Tax-on-Overtime Deduction​

For tax years 2025 through 2028, workers can deduct qualifying FLSA overtime premium pay under the new no-tax-on-overtime provision — but only the premium half of time-and-a-half required by federal law. Straight-time wages paid under the seasonal exemption contain no FLSA premium, so there is nothing for your crew to deduct. If you claim the exemption, set that expectation during onboarding; if a worker asks why their pay stub shows no deductible overtime, the answer is the same exemption that lets you staff 55-hour peak weeks without the federal premium. How the deduction computes the premium is covered in our guide to the OBBBA overtime deduction.

Your Pre-Season Checklist​

1. Check state law first. If your state has no seasonal exemption, budget for overtime and stop.
2. Count operating months for the current calendar year at each location, treating any month open to the public as operating.
3. Run the receipts test on last year's books: average of the six smallest months against the six largest, or the 75 percent shortcut.
4. Map every worker to an establishment — park crew versus headquarters, concessionaires included — and configure payroll accordingly.
5. Keep daily time records for everyone, exempt or not.
6. Audit teen schedules against the 14- and 15-year-old hour caps before peak weeks.
7. Re-run the receipts test every January and re-confirm the coming season's calendar.

Clean monthly books make every step except the first one mechanical. The receipts test eats month-by-month revenue by location; the operations test eats an honest operating calendar; the employed-by question eats a worker roster tied to a site. If your ledger can produce all three on demand, an exemption review is an afternoon's work instead of a forensic project — and the same records are your defense file if anyone ever asks how you qualified.

Keep Season-Proof Books All Year​

Seasonal payroll is unforgiving: the tests that decide your overtime bill run on last year's monthly receipts, and reconstructing them from a shoebox of statements is how exemptions get lost. Beancount documentation walks through ledger patterns that keep revenue broken out by location and month, and the dashboard views make the six-and-six receipts comparison easy to eyeball each January. Beancount.io gives you plain-text accounting that is transparent, version-controlled, and AI-ready — your whole season's proof in text files you own. Get started for free and head into hiring season with books that already know the answer.