Today, the Department of Labor issued a new rule that updates the regulations determining which white-collar, salaried employees are entitled to the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime pay protections. The rule increases the salary threshold below which most white-collar, salaried workers are entitled to overtime from the current $455 per week (or $23,660 for a full-year worker) to $913 per week (or $47,476 for a full-year worker).

The updates will impact 4.2 million workers who will either gain new overtime protections or get a raise to the new salary threshold. So who are these workers?

More than half − 56 percent − are women, which translates into 2.4 million women either gaining overtime protections or getting a raise to the new threshold as a result of the rule. We also find that more than half – 53 percent − of affected workers have at least a four-year college degree, and more than 3 in 5 (61 percent) are age 35 or older. And 1.5 million are parents of children under 18, which translates into 2.5 million children seeing at least one parent gain overtime protections or get a raise to the new threshold.

To get a deeper understanding, it’s also helpful to look at the group that affected workers come from – those currently exempt from overtime (that is, white-collar workers who were not entitled to overtime pay before this rule change). Workers currently exempt are those who are paid on a salary basis, earn at least $455 per week, and are employed in a bona fide executive, administrative or professional capacity (definitions of these categories used in the regulation can be found here). The first column in the table below shows the demographic breakdown of white-collar, salaried workers who are currently exempt from overtime protections.