workbery.com – Everyday work can be quite stressful. Of course you have to relax regularly and that works best on vacation. But how much holiday entitlement do you actually have? And what happens in certain situations with your days off, for example when you are ill, still in the probationary period or parental leave is pending? We will answer these and many other questions about holiday entitlement.
Your legal holiday entitlement
The so-called Federal Holidays Act, which has existed since 1963, records the annual paid holidays for employees. This law stipulates that every person is entitled to at least 24 working days of paid vacation per year. The reason for this: In Germany, Saturday is still considered a working day. Employees have at least four weeks paid vacation.
How long your holiday entitlement actually is depends on the length of your working week:
Do you have a 6 day week? This gives you – as just mentioned – a vacation entitlement of at least 24 days.
Do you have a 5 day week? This results in a holiday entitlement of at least 20 days.
The Federal Holidays Act not only regulates your holiday entitlement, but also whether you can take the remaining days of holiday with you into the next year or what happens to your days off when you leave the company (more on this in the “Holiday entitlement in the event of termination” section).
In general: In order to recover sufficiently, you should have taken your vacation days by the end of the year. If that doesn’t work out for any reason (it was difficult to agree with colleagues, there were too many deadlines or similar), you can take the rest of your vacation with you into the next year. Then you have until March 31st to use up these remaining days. If that doesn’t work, your claim will be forfeited.
Good to know: The European Court of Justice has determined that employers are obliged to inform employees in good time if there is still an entitlement to vacation. Only if there was this notice and employees still do not take or apply for their vacation do the vacation days expire.
Special leave is not regulated in the Federal Leave Act, for example if you get married, move house or have a bereavement in the family. You can negotiate how your holiday entitlement is in such situations in your employment contract when you start a new job. However, it can also be defined in a collective agreement or in company agreements.
By the way: From a legal point of view, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are normal working days. If you want to have these days off, you have to sacrifice a full day of vacation each time. But other rules can also apply here through employment contracts, collective bargaining agreements or company agreements.
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Calculate holiday entitlement: Here’s how
To calculate your vacation entitlement, you need to convert the statutory vacation entitlement, which is stated in working days, into working days. The following formula will help you:
Total vacation: number of working days per week x actual number of working days
To make this calculation a little easier for you, we have a calculation example:
If you have 24 vacation days, divide it by 6 working days per week and multiply by the actual days of the week you work: 24 ÷ 6 x 5 = 20 vacation days.
Because your vacation days are usually included in your employment contract, you usually don’t have to calculate your statutory vacation entitlement yourself.
Holiday entitlement upon termination
It doesn’t matter whether you give notice yourself or the company gives you notice – in both cases you are entitled to the remaining holiday entitlement. This is documented by the Federal Holidays Leave Act (§7 Paragraph 4). It states that you should have taken your remaining vacation time before you leave the company for good. If you are unable to take time off, the company must pay you for your vacation.
The decisive factor is when exactly you leave the company. This point in time is decisive for your entitlement to remaining leave. There are two options here:
If you leave by June 30th, you are still entitled to a proportionate holiday entitlement.
If you leave the company after July 1st, you have full holiday entitlement if you give notice in the second half of the year – minus the days you have already taken.
If you would like to find out how much holiday you are entitled to, there is another formula that we will explain to you using an example:
You have a vacation entitlement of 20 days a year and leave the company on April 31. This results in the following vacation entitlement for you: 4 months ÷ 12 months x 20 days = 6.66 days.
If there is a decimal place, employers usually round up in your favour, so in this example there are seven prorated vacation days. So you see: Even if you give notice, you do not have to forego your holiday entitlement.
Holiday entitlement in a mini job
Even if there are differences between mini-jobs and full-time employment, this does not affect holiday entitlement. In plain language this means: According to the Federal Holidays Act, mini-jobbers have a right to paid holidays. And that means you are entitled to holiday even with a 520-euro job (the earnings limit for mini-jobs has been 520 euros since October 1, 2022).
How much annual leave you have depends on your working days, not on the number of hours worked per day. If mini-jobbers work six days a week, even if it is only one hour, six working days are counted towards their holiday entitlement. Even Sundays or public holidays can count as working days.
However, mini-jobbers often work fewer than six days a week. Therefore, the minimum vacation per year is calculated proportionately here too, using this formula:
Number of working days per week x 24 ÷ 6
Statutory holiday entitlement in mini-jobs
1 working day per week – 4 vacation days per year in days
2 working days per week – 8 vacation days per year in days
3 working days per week – 12 vacation days per year in days
4 working days per week – 16 vacation days per year in days
5 working days per week – 20 vacation days per year in days
6 working days per week – 24 vacation days per year in days
It also happens that mini-jobbers do not always work the same number of days per week. They work two days one week and three days the other. In this case, two things matter:
How many working days total per year.
How many days per week employees work in the same company.
If the company has a 5-day week, you can assume a total of 260 working days per year. A company with a 6-day week has 312 working days a year. These figures are important for calculating the statutory holiday entitlement in a mini-job. And this calculation looks like this:
Statutory vacation days per year x number of working days per year ÷ 260 (or divide by 312 if there is a 6-day week)
Concrete example for the calculation of holiday entitlement mini-job:
You work 80 days a year in a mini job. Your colleagues work a 5-day week and are entitled to 20 vacation days a year.
20 vacation days x 80 working days ÷ 260 = 6.15 days.
You are therefore entitled to six paid vacation days per year.
Holiday entitlement during parental leave
Unlike the holiday entitlement during maternity leave (here the regular holiday entitlement applies), your employer has the right to reduce your annual entitlement by one twelfth for each full month of your absence. Because this is again quite complex, here is a vivid example:
You are entitled to 30 days of vacation. You will be on parental leave from January 8th to July 15th. As a result, you will be away from the company for five full calendar months (February, March, April, May, June). In January and July you are only on maternity leave for a few days. This results in the following calculation for your holiday entitlement:
5/12 (February, March, April, May, June) you are not working for the company, so you still have 7/12 of the year and therefore also of your 30 vacation days left = 17.5 days.
You have already read above that you can use your remaining vacation time by March 31st. of the following year. If you are on parental leave, there are other regulations regarding remaining leave. Then you are entitled to your remaining days off both in the current year after your parental leave and in the following year. Only if you don’t take it during this time does it expire. Here, too, your employer is obliged to inform you of the remaining vacation time with expiration periods.
Part-time leave entitlement
If you are planning to start a part-time job or would like to reduce your working hours, you are probably wondering how this will affect your holiday entitlement. What matters is how your working hours are distributed. In general, people who work part-time are also entitled to four weeks of paid leave.
For example, if you work fewer hours but five days a week, you are entitled to the same number of vacation days as your full-time colleagues. The only requirement: you work in a company where people work five days a week. The invoice is transferable to companies with a 6-day week.
But to be on the safe side, there is a formula for calculating your part-time leave entitlement:
Full-time x part-time working days per week ÷ typical full-time working days per week
And because all this is a bit abstract, here is another calculation example:
Your colleagues get 30 days paid vacation. You work four days a week and your company works a five-day week. This results in the following calculation:
(30 x 4) ÷ 5 = 24 (= holiday entitlement of 24 days in a 4-day week)
Holiday entitlement in the event of illness
Being sick on vacation sucks. But there is also good news: you can get your vacation days back. If a medical certificate confirms the days you were ill, they do not count as vacation days and you can take them later in the year.
You do not have to report sick directly to your employer. But you should present a medical certificate after your vacation. All days that your doctor gives you sick leave do not count as vacation days. It is only important that the certificate is valid from the first day of your illness. You should therefore try to get sick leave as soon as possible so as not to waste vacation days.
If you become ill shortly before the start of your vacation, you have the right to postpone your vacation – of course in consultation with your employer.
Holiday entitlement during the probationary period
We would like to clear up a myth that persists, namely that there is a holiday ban during the probationary period. That’s nonsense – at least there is no legal regulation. What is true, however, is that you are only entitled to your full annual leave after six months with the company. In the Federal Holidays Act (§ 4) this time is referred to as the waiting period.
Furthermore, the protection against dismissal only takes effect after six months, and during the probationary period there is usually a shortened notice period of two weeks.
So it’s completely understandable that you want to make a good impression right at the beginning and don’t want to come around the corner with your holiday wishes right away. Nevertheless, you collect a twelfth of your annual leave almost every working month and this accumulation begins with your probationary period. This means that you can theoretically take a proportionate amount of vacation time in the first six months. With a 5-day week, you would be entitled to 1.67 days of vacation after one month (1/12 of 20 = 1.67) and after three months it would be five days of vacation (3/12 of 20 = 5).
In some companies, employees get more vacation time than they are legally entitled to. For example, if you have not only 20, but even 30 vacation days per year, you will have five days off (2/12 of 30 = 5) after just two months (even during the probationary period). In principle, your employer must approve your holiday application – regardless of whether you are still in the probationary period or have already completed it.
If you don’t just want to shine during the probationary period, but already in the application phase, then use our free CV generator. With our templates, you can quickly create professional documents that recruiters will love.
Holiday entitlement for working students
Balancing work and studies is a real challenge. Regular breaks are extremely important to recharge your batteries. We’ll tell you what your vacation entitlement is as a working student and we have positive news straight away: As a working student, you too have a statutory vacation entitlement. As in many previous cases, this is regulated in the Federal Holidays Act. From a legal point of view, as a working student you are a part-time employee and can therefore also look forward to paid vacation.
As you have read in the “Part-time holiday entitlement” section above, you are entitled to four full weeks of holiday per year if you work part-time. And the same applies to you: It is not the number of hours per day that you work that is decisive, but the number of days that you work in the week. And even if you already know it, here is your holiday entitlement as a working student at a glance:
Holiday entitlement for working students
5 working days per week – 20 days vacation per year
4 working days per week – 16 days vacation per year
3 working days per week – 12 days vacation per year
2 working days per week – 8 days vacation per year
1 working day per week – 4 days vacation per year
Lectures, learning phases and exams certainly ensure that you cannot always work a certain number of hours on fixed days. But even then you can calculate how much holiday entitlement you are entitled to as a working student, like this:
Calculate your weekly hours that you work on average (e.g. approx. 10 hours)
Find out how many vacation days per year full-time employees have in the company you work for (e.g. 28 days per year)
Convert this vacation entitlement to hours by multiplying the sum by 8 (28 x 8 = 224)
Now you multiply the vacation entitlement in hours by your average weekly hours (224 x 10 = 2,240)
Finally, divide the total by 40 (= average number of full-time hours per week) (2,240 ÷ 40 = 56)
This example calculation shows that you are entitled to 56 hours of vacation per year. Important to know: Unfortunately, collecting vacation time does not work because your entire vacation entitlement expires after one year.
