Working-Time Exclusion for Italian Dirigenti: What It Does & Doesn’t Cover

When a group headquartered outside Italy appoints a senior executive to run its Italian operations, the instinctive assumption is often that the person is simply “exempt” from working-time rules — the local equivalent of a US exempt employee or a UK senior manager who has “opted out.” The Italian reality is more precise, and the shortcut can be misleading in both directions. There is indeed a genuine working-time exclusion for corporate executives (dirigenti) under Italian law, and it is broad. But it is not a general waiver of protection, it does not switch on automatically because a contract carries the word dirigente, and it removes far less than employers may assume once the analysis moves past the maximum-hours question.

The theme of this article is that exclusion from ordinary working-time limits is a statutory derogation with defined edges, conditional on the substance of the role. Get the substance wrong and the exclusion evaporates — together with several assumptions built on top of it, from unpaid overtime to the ease of dismissal.

The legal status of “dirigente”

Italian law does not offer a tidy statutory definition of dirigente. Article 2095 of the Civil Code sorts subordinate employees into four categories — dirigenti (executives), quadri (middle managers), impiegati (white-collar employees) and operai (blue-collar workers) — but expressly leaves the criteria for belonging to each category to special legislation and, in practice, to collective bargaining. The quadro category was carved out later, by Law No. 190/1985, precisely as an intermediate tier that is not part of executive rank.

Because the statute is silent on substance, the operative definition of dirigente is jurisprudential. The consolidated position of the Court of Cassation identifies the executive by an elevated degree of professionalism, genuine autonomy and discretion in decision-making, and a fiduciary relationship with the employer. The dirigenti are often described as the entrepreneur’s alter ego, capable of influencing the overall direction of the business or of a significant branch of it. Hierarchical seniority and a generous salary are indicators, not the test.

Two consequences follow:

• First, substance prevails over the contractual label: an employee is a dirigente because of what the role actually is, not because the letter of engagement says so. 
• Second, the Italian dirigente is a narrower and more demanding concept than the loose international vocabulary of “manager,” “senior manager,” “officer” or “exempt employee.” A person with an impressive title and a team to run may still be, in law, a quadro or an impiegato con funzioni direttive (an employee with managerial duties) rather than a dirigente.

Article 17 of Legislative Decree No. 66/2003

The working-time exclusion sits in Article 17(5) of Legislative Decree No. 66/2003, the statute that reorganised working time in Italy in implementation of the EU Working Time Directive. It provides that, with due regard for the general principles of protection of workers’ safety and health, a defined set of working-time provisions does not apply to workers whose working time is not measured or predetermined, or can be determined by the workers themselves. This is because of the specific characteristics of the activity typical of the dirigente. 

In Article 17(5) of Legislative Decree No. 66/2003, the key operative condition is that, due to the characteristics of the activity performed, the worker’s daily and weekly working time is not measured, is not predetermined, or can be determined by the worker him or herself. The provision then specifies that this situation occurs in particular for: (a) corporate executives (dirigenti), executive‑level personnel and other persons holding autonomous decision‑making powers; (b) family workers; (c) workers in the liturgical sector of churches and religious communities; and (d) workers performing home work or telework. In practice, the title ‘dirigente’ is therefore not sufficient on its own: the factual autonomy over working time remains the decisive element for the derogation to apply. 

The provisions disapplied by Article 17(5) are Articles 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12 and 13 of the decree. In practical terms, for a genuine executive this removes:

• the ordinary weekly working time of 40 hours (Article 3);
• the maximum average weekly limit of 48 hours including overtime (Article 4);
• the overtime regime and overtime premiums (Article 5);
• the right to 11 consecutive hours of daily rest per 24 hours (Article 7);
• the statutory rest break during the working day (Article 8);
• the organisation and duration limits of night work (Articles 12 and 13).

This is the source of the accurate but incomplete statement that Italian executives have “no time clock.” Two features of the provision are decisive and frequently overlooked.

First, the derogation is not a blanket exemption keyed to job title. Its operative condition is autonomy over one’s own working time — that the duration of work is not measured, not predetermined, or is determined by the worker. The reference to dirigenti is illustrative of that condition, not a substitute for it. This reading is not an Italian idiosyncrasy: Article 17(1) of Directive 2003/88/EC is the parent provision, and the European Commission’s Interpretative Communication on the Directive, together with the case law of the Court of Justice, treats the “autonomous worker” derogation as one to be construed restrictively — it does not exempt senior managers as a class.

Recent case law of the Court of Cassation confirms that the derogation in Article 17(5) must be interpreted restrictively. It is not sufficient for the worker to be formally classified as dirigente or to be assigned ‘directive functions’. The exclusion applies only where, in practice, the worker’s activity is organised in such a way that working time is genuinely not measured or predetermined and can be managed autonomously. Where an employee, despite the executive label, actually works on fixed schedules set by the employer or is subject to detailed time‑tracking, the derogation does not apply and the ordinary working‑time regime, including maximum‑hours limits and overtime rules, resumes full effect.

Second, the opening clause preserving safety and health is not decoration. It anchors the point developed in the next section: the derogation lifts the ceilings on hours, not the employer’s duty to protect the worker.

What the exclusion does not remove

The most expensive error for a foreign employer is to read Article 17(5) as removing everything. It does not.

Weekly rest and annual leave survive. The derogation list is deliberately limited to the articles cited above. It does not include Article 9 (weekly rest) or Article 10 (minimum annual paid leave of four weeks). A genuine dirigente therefore retains the right to weekly rest and to statutory annual leave. This is reinforced at constitutional level: Article 36 of the Italian Constitution guarantees weekly rest and paid annual leave as rights the worker cannot renounce. No contract, and no derogation, converts an executive into someone who can be lawfully required never to rest.

Health and safety obligations remain in full. The safety-and-health proviso in Article 17(5) preserves the general principles of protection. The employer’s duty of care under Article 2087 of the Civil Code — to adopt the measures necessary to protect the physical integrity and moral personality of the worker — applies to executives as to anyone else, as does the framework of the consolidated Health and Safety Act. Excessive, health-damaging workloads are not immunised by the working-time derogation.

Remuneration principles remain. Article 36 of the Constitution requires pay proportionate to the quantity and quality of work and sufficient to ensure a dignified existence. The absence of an overtime regime does not license unlimited unpaid demands; it means the executive’s compensation is structured globally rather than by the hour.

Record-keeping and compliance do not disappear. Even where hours are not capped, employers remain subject to broader documentation, payroll and organisational duties, and should not assume that “no working-time limits” means “no records at all.”

In short, the exclusion narrows to the maximum-hours and rest-break architecture. Everything oriented to health, safety, weekly recuperation, annual leave and fair pay stays in place.

The pseudo-dirigente risk

The category most dangerous to multinational employers is the pseudo-dirigente (sometimes finto dirigente) which describes a person given the executive label without the executive substance. Because Italian law tests substance over form, a court asked to examine the role can find that the individual never exercised the autonomy, seniority, decision-making authority or fiduciary function that the status requires. The label is then set aside and the relationship is requalified.

Requalification has two distinct consequences, and they are the crux of the exposure.

The first is working time. If the person is not, in substance, an executive with autonomy over their own hours, the Article 17 exclusion does not cover them. They fall back into the ordinary regime, which reactivates the maximum-hours limits and, crucially, the overtime rules. A “manager” who in reality kept fixed hours under close direction may be able to claim unpaid overtime and rest-related protections for the period worked, where the facts support it. 

This risk is far from theoretical. Once a role is requalified, the worker can claim unpaid overtime, additional remuneration for work performed beyond ordinary limits, and related social‑security contributions for the entire period covered by the claim, subject to the applicable limitation periods. The resulting exposure is retrospective and can be financially significant for the employer.

The second is on employment protection, addressed under dismissal below: a requalified employee regains the dismissal protections available to non-executives, which are materially stronger than the executive regime.

The practical lesson is that the title is the cheapest and least reliable part of the arrangement. What protects the employer is a role that genuinely matches the status.

Collective bargaining agreements

Italian executive employment cannot be assessed from statute alone, because much of the executive’s economic and procedural treatment is set by the applicable national collective bargaining agreement (contratto collettivo nazionale di lavoro, or CCNL). This is where a great deal of the practical protection for dirigenti actually lives — notice periods, termination indemnities, the machinery for challenging a dismissal, supplementary economic treatment, welfare and insurance provisions, and, importantly, the definition of dirigente used for classification within that sector.

The essential compliance message is not to generalise across sectors. Different executive CCNLs apply to different industries, and they differ from one another in material respects; there is no single uniform executive regime. The agreement that governs a given executive relationship must be identified and reviewed case by case, in the version currently in force. The official repository of national collective agreements is maintained by CNEL (the National Council for Economics and Labour), which is the correct starting point for verification rather than assumption. A foreign employer that drafts an executive contract without confirming which CCNL applies, and what it requires, is working blind on precisely the terms most likely to be litigated.

Dismissal classifications and why they matter

Dismissal in Italy is not a single category, and the executive dimension is where classification and requalification bite hardest. The relevant distinctions are between the general regime for non-executives and the special position of genuine executives — and between the private and public sectors.

Genuine private-sector dirigente:

The executive relationship rests on the fiduciary bond, and the statutory starting point is free terminability with notice under Article 2118 of the Civil Code, or termination without notice for just cause (giusta causa) under Article 2119. By express provision — Article 10 of Law No. 604/1966 — the general limiting regime for individual dismissals (requiring giusta causa or giustificato motivo, subjective or objective) does not apply to dirigenti; that exclusion has long been treated as constitutionally legitimate. Executives are, however, not without protection. Collective bargaining has introduced the contractual notion of giustificatezza (broadly, non-arbitrariness of the dismissal), the absence of which entitles the executive to a supplementary indemnity (indennità supplementare) whose amount is fixed by the applicable CCNL. 

As regards form, dismissal must be communicated in writing. While Law No. 604/1966 does not extend its substantive just‑cause/justified‑reason regime to dirigenti (Article 10), the requirement of written notice of dismissal is now a general rule of the Italian system and is reinforced by later legislation, including Legislative Decree No. 23/2015 for workers engaged under the ‘tutele crescenti’ scheme. In practice, both case law and the applicable executive collective agreements treat written form as mandatory for terminating an executive employment relationship. And protection against null and discriminatory dismissal — with reinstatement under Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute and Law No. 108/1990 — remains available to executives as to everyone else.

Collective dismissals:

One important correction to the “executives are outside the system” assumption, following the Court of Justice’s judgment of 13 February 2014 in Case C-596/12 (Commission v Italy), which held that excluding dirigenti from collective-redundancy procedures breached Directive 98/59/EC, Italy amended Article 24 of Law No. 223/1991 through Law No. 161/2014. 

Following the amendments introduced by Law No. 161/2014 to Article 24 of Law No. 223/1991, executives are included in the headcount and in the thresholds for collective redundancies, are fully covered by the information and consultation procedure, and are entitled to a specific monetary indemnity where the procedure or the selection criteria are breached. The amount of this indemnity is set by statute at a significant level, calculated on the basis of the executive’s remuneration, and is distinct from the indemnities provided for individual dismissals.

Requalified pseudo-dirigente:

If the executive label is set aside, the individual is no longer in the executive regime for dismissal purposes either. They regain the general protections against dismissal available to quadri and impiegati, meaning the employer must be able to show giusta causa or giustificato motivo and face the ordinary sanctions regime. A dismissal that would have cost a supplementary indemnity for a real executive can become considerably more consequential once the person is found to have been an ordinary employee all along.

Public-sector dirigenti: 

The public executive is a different animal. Public employment is regulated by Legislative Decree No. 165/2001, read against the constitutional principles of sound administration and impartiality. Free terminability under Article 2118 of the Civil Code does not apply; the underlying employment relationship is stable, and consequences flow instead from responsabilità dirigenziale under Article 21 — failure to meet objectives or non-observance of directives — producing a graduated response (non-renewal or revocation of the assignment and, in the gravest cases, termination), subject to procedural safeguards and the opinion of a guarantee committee. 

The Workers’ Statute applies to public administrations as employers; however, its operation is coordinated with the special framework of Legislative Decree No. 165/2001 and with constitutional principles such as impartiality and good administration. Certain protections and procedures are therefore implemented through the specific mechanisms of public‑sector employment rather than being transplanted mechanically from the private‑sector regime. The point for a multinational is simply that the private-sector executive playbook cannot be transplanted onto a public-sector relationship.

The right to disconnect and digital availability

Executive autonomy over working time sits awkwardly with a culture of constant connectivity, and here it is essential to separate legal obligation from organisational practice.

Italy has no general, free-standing statutory “right to disconnect” covering all employees. In Italian law there is no general, free‑standing statutory right to disconnect applicable to all workers. The main explicit provision is Article 19 of Law No. 81/2017 on agile work, which requires individual smart‑working agreements to specify rest times and the technical and organisational measures needed to ensure disconnection from work devices. In the public sector, Decree‑Law No. 30/2021, converted by Law No. 61/2021, has introduced an additional reference to disconnection within the framework of smart working for public employees. These rules, however, remain sector‑specific and do not amount to a universal right to disconnect.

For a genuine dirigente, the maximum-hours limits are disapplied and the lavoro agile disconnection mechanism will often not map neatly onto a role defined by self-organised time. That does not leave the field empty. Weekly rest and annual leave remain (see above), and the employer’s duty of care under Article 2087 of the Civil Code continues to bound the intensity of demands, including out-of-hours availability that becomes systematic and health-damaging. Expectations of responsiveness, availability windows and digital contact for executives are therefore best treated as matters of policy and contract design — legitimate, but to be documented and calibrated — rather than as areas where the working-time derogation has removed all constraints.

Why foreign “exempt” status does not transfer to Italy

Global HR frameworks tend to classify senior staff once — as “exempt,” “senior manager,” “officer” or “at-will executive” — and to assume the classification travels. In Italy it does not. “At-will” termination has no counterpart. Even the executive regime requires notice or just cause and is tempered by giustificatezza and, in collective and discriminatory scenarios, by mandatory procedures and reinstatement. “Exempt” status is not equivalent to the dirigente derogation, which is narrower, conditional on genuine autonomy, and silent on rest and leave. Comparisons with foreign systems are useful only as a warning. Importing a global category without adapting it to Italian classification is one of the most common sources of requalification risk and overtime exposure for foreign-headquartered companies in Italy.

Practical compliance checklist for multinational employers

• Classification: Test the role against the substantive markers of dirigente — autonomy, discretionary decision-making, seniority, fiduciary function — not against the title. Confirm the person is not, in reality, a quadro or an impiegato con funzioni direttive.
• Working-time autonomy: Verify that the executive genuinely determines their own working time. If hours are in fact measured, predetermined or externally imposed, the Article 17(5) exclusion is unsafe.
• Applicable CCNL: Identify the correct executive collective agreement and review the version in force (via CNEL) for notice, indemnities, procedure and any classification definition.
• Contract drafting: Reflect the real scope of authority; avoid boilerplate imported from another jurisdiction; align title, functions and powers.
• Remuneration structure: Build compensation on a global basis consistent with the absence of an overtime regime, while respecting the constitutional adequacy-of-pay principle.
• Rest and leave: Do not treat weekly rest and annual leave as waived, they survive the derogation and are constitutionally protected.
• Health, safety and duty of care: Manage workload and availability within Article 2087 of the Civil Code and the health-and-safety framework, notwithstanding the absence of hour caps.
• Remote/hybrid and digital availability: Where smart working applies, comply with the Article 19 disconnection requirements otherwise set availability expectations by clear, documented policy.
• Dismissal planning: Anticipate both the executive regime (giustificatezza, supplementary indemnity, null/discriminatory protections, collective-dismissal procedure) and the requalification scenario, which restores ordinary protections.
• Documentation: Keep evidence of autonomy, functions and decision-making authority — the material that defends the classification if it is ever challenged.

Conclusion

Italian dirigenti may indeed sit outside the ordinary daily and weekly working-time limits: there is no time clock at the top. But the exclusion under Article 17(5) of Legislative Decree No. 66/2003 is a defined derogation, not a general immunity. It is conditional on genuine autonomy over working time, it is read restrictively in line with EU law, and it leaves untouched weekly rest, annual leave, health-and-safety duties, the employer’s duty of care and the principle of fair pay. Where the executive label is not matched by executive substance, the derogation fails and the ordinary regime returns — with retrospective overtime exposure and stronger dismissal protections. For multinational employers, the safeguard is not the title on the contract but a correctly classified role, the right collective agreement, and expectations documented in line with Italian law rather than imported wholesale from abroad.

AL AdvaLux is a firm focused on Italian executive employment law, advising international executives and multinational employers on precisely these matters. Assessing and structuring dirigente classification, drafting and reviewing executive contracts against the applicable CCNL, calibrating working-time, remote-work and digital-availability arrangements, and managing executive dismissal and requalification risk under Italian law.