{"id":11070,"date":"2026-06-30T01:24:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T01:24:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/u-s-department-of-labor-loosens-standards-for-permissible-use-of-unpaid-interns\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T01:24:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T01:24:22","slug":"u-s-department-of-labor-loosens-standards-for-permissible-use-of-unpaid-interns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/u-s-department-of-labor-loosens-standards-for-permissible-use-of-unpaid-interns\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Department of Labor Loosens Standards for Permissible Use of Unpaid Interns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On January 5, the U.S. Department of Labor announced<\/a> that it would abandon the test by which it had previously evaluated the permissibility of using unpaid interns. The DOL\u2019s previous position, adopted in an April 2010 Fact Sheet, had been that unless an unpaid internship program met each of the six criteria set out in the Fact Sheet, unpaid interns would be considered employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (\u201cFLSA\u201d), entitled to be paid minimum and overtime wages. One of the criteria, for example, was whether the employer \u201cderives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.\u201d Under the 2010 test, many employers considered it prohibitively risky to maintain unpaid internship programs.<\/p>\n

In its new Fact Sheet<\/a>,\u00a0the DOL has adopted the \u201cprimary beneficiary\u201d test endorsed by multiple federal courts. The \u201cprimary beneficiary test\u201d was applied to the internship context first by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Glatt <\/em>v. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc.<\/em>, 791 F.3d 376 (2d Cir. 2015), amended and superseded by <\/em>811 F.3d 526 (2d Cir. 2016), and was adopted thereafter by the Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. View our memorandum on the Glatt<\/em> decision. The primary beneficiary test assesses whether the internship\u2019s benefits to the intern outweigh the benefits to the employer. If the intern is the primary beneficiary, he or she should not be classified as an employee and, thus, would not be subject to the FLSA. On the other hand, if the employer is the \u201cprimary beneficiary,\u201d the intern is considered an \u201cemployee\u201d and is therefore entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay, and is covered by the other provisions of the FLSA.<\/p>\n

To assess whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary, the DOL Fact Sheet lists the following seven non-exhaustive factors, the same as those used by the Second Circuit in Glatt<\/em>:<\/p>\n