Chapter 2 named salary basis as one of three separate tests an exempt employee must pass, alongside salary level and primary duty. The regulation defines it precisely: an employee is paid on a salary basis if the employee regularly receives, each pay period on a weekly or less frequent basis, a predetermined amount constituting all or part of the employee’s compensation. That amount must not be reduced because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed. Both halves matter. “Predetermined” means the amount is fixed in advance of the workweek, not calculated afterward from how much or how well the employee worked. “Not subject to reduction” means the employer cannot treat that fixed amount as a ceiling to be trimmed when output or quality falls short — the two features together are what separates a salary from a rate.

The regulation makes the practical consequence explicit: subject to a set of exceptions, an exempt employee must receive the full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work at all, regardless of the number of days or hours worked in that week. An employee who works three hours on Monday and is sent home for the rest of the week because business is slow is still owed the full weekly salary. It is the employer, not the employee, who caused the absence by sending the employee home, and the regulation bars deductions when work is not available for the employee to perform. The flip side is equally exact: exempt employees need not be paid for any workweek in which they perform no work whatsoever. The full-salary requirement attaches to weeks with any work in them, not to every week on the calendar.

This is the rule the rest of the chapter turns on because the regulation ties the same test to who controls the absence. An employee is not paid on a salary basis if deductions from the predetermined amount are made for absences occasioned by the employer or by the operating requirements of the business — and if the employee is ready, willing, and able to work (that is, still available and willing to do the job even though the employer currently has none to give), no deduction may be made simply because the employer had no work available. Docking pay for that reason does not just cost the employee a day’s wages; it calls the salary basis itself into question. The exceptions that let an employer deduct pay without losing the exemption are narrow and specific, and the next section works through them one at a time.