Chapter 2 covered the general exempt test — salary basis, salary level, and primary duty. For the executive exemption specifically, § 541.100(a) adds three separate, cumulative requirements beyond that salary test, and an employee must satisfy all three — not just one — to qualify. Under § 541.100(a)(2), the employee’s primary duty must be management of the enterprise or of a customarily recognized department or subdivision — this is the primary-duty element, analyzed under the factors at § 541.700. Under § 541.100(a)(3), the employee must customarily and regularly (a frequency greater than occasional, though it need not be constant — work performed normally and recurrently every workweek, not an isolated or one-time task, per § 541.701) direct the work of two or more other full-time employees, or their equivalent. And under § 541.100(a)(4), the employee must have real authority to hire or fire, or have hiring, firing, and other status-change recommendations that are given particular weight. These last two are not part of the primary-duty analysis — they are their own requirements. A worker who carries a manager’s title but fails even one of these three requirements is not exempt under this section, regardless of what the title says.

What counts as “management” is defined broadly under § 541.102 — it includes interviewing, selecting, and training employees; setting their pay and hours; directing their work; handling complaints and discipline; planning the work and apportioning it among employees; and planning and controlling a budget, among the other listed activities. The department or subdivision the employee manages has to be a real, permanent unit with a continuing function — not, as § 541.103 puts it, “a mere collection of employees assigned from time to time to a specific job or series of jobs.” An employer with several locations can generally treat the person in charge of each location as managing a recognized subdivision of the enterprise, and a unit does not lose its status merely because the employee occasionally draws workers from a pool or from other units, as long as other facts still show the employee is actually in charge of a continuing unit.

The two-or-more-employees requirement, addressed at § 541.104, is counted in full-time equivalents — one full-time employee plus two half-time employees satisfies it, and so do four half-time employees — and the supervision can be split among several exempt supervisors as long as each one customarily and regularly directs at least two full-time workers of their own. Under § 541.104(d), the same employee’s hours cannot be counted toward two different supervisors’ two-or-more-employee counts at once — shared responsibility for supervising the same worker does not satisfy the requirement for both supervisors. A full-time employee who splits a week between two supervisors — four hours for one, four for the other, for example — can be credited as a half-time employee toward each supervisor’s count, since that employee’s time is genuinely divided rather than doubly counted. An employee who merely fills in for the actual manager, supervising others only during that manager’s absence, does not meet this element. The hiring-and-firing element works differently: an employee does not need the final say. Under § 541.105, whether the employee’s input carries “particular weight” depends on factors that include, but are not limited to, whether making such recommendations is part of the employee’s job, how often they are made, and how often they are relied upon. That input generally must pertain to employees the executive customarily supervises, not an occasional, informal opinion about a co-worker’s status. And recommendations solicited only as a formality and then routinely disregarded do not carry the weight the regulation requires, since § 541.105 turns on whether the input is actually relied upon in practice, not merely whether it is asked for.