A Texas judge on Tuesday blocked President Obama's new rule intended to force companies to pay workers more overtime, agreeing with businesses that the administration overstepped its authority and that only Congress could approve such an expansion of the federal overtime law.

Business groups cheered the emergency injunction for the expansion, which was scheduled to start Dec. 1. "This is a victory for small business owners and should give them some breathing room until the case can be properly adjudicated," said Juanita Duggan, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business trade group that opposed the rule.

Federal law says employees must be paid time-and-a-half once they work more than 40 hours in a week. However, businesses may exempt workers from the requirement if their duties are "managerial" in nature and they reach a certain salary threshold.

In May, the Labor Department announced that that threshold, previously $23,000 annually, would rise to more than $47,000 on Dec. 1, and would be updated every three years to reflect wage growth. The administration's rule change would have meant that 4 million more workers would be eligible for overtime. Because it was an administrative reinterpretation of the existing Fair Labor Standards Act, the White House said that the change did not require congressional approval.

The White House said the change was needed to reflect current wage conditions, noting that the percentage of workers earning overtime had fallen from 62 percent in 1975 to 7 percent today.

"Companies will have a choice to make: Either they pay their workers overtime or they cap the work week at 40 hours. Either way, the worker wins," Vice President Joe Biden told reporters when the rule was announced.

A coalition of business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce challenged the rulemaking in court, arguing before U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in the Eastern District of Texas that such a far-reaching change required legislative approval. An ad-hoc coalition of 21 state attorneys general made the same argument in a separate action in the same jurisdiction. Mazzant was appointed by Obama in 2014.

"The Labor Department's overtime changes are a reckless and aggressive overreach of executive power, and retailers are pleased with the judge's decision," said David French, senior vice president for government relations for the National Retail Federation.

Critics of the rule have pointed to a recent study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that found that canceling the Obama administration's overtime rule expansion would result in a net increase of $2.1 billion in real income for families in 2017.

"Real family income would fall for a small number of families because of the loss of overtime pay; rise for families with business income because of the increase in profits; and rise slightly for all families considered together because of the slight reduction in [consumer] prices. Most of the increased income would accrue to families in the top fifth of the family income distribution, but average real income would increase for families in each [income group] in most years," the report found.