Traffic sent through an egress policer with a non-zero CIR ia reprofiled by default based on the CIR threshold of the egress policer. To accommodate designs where traffic is set to be out-of-profile at ingress, and the out-of-profile state is required to be maintained by an egress policer, the parameter profile-out-preserve can be configured under the egress policer. Explicit egress reclassification to the profile takes precedence over the profile-out-preserve operation.