Germany Vacation Entitlement: The Statutory Minimum Under § 3 BUrlG

German law does not leave paid annual leave to negotiation between an employer and an employee. A statutory floor is fixed by the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, the Federal Leave Act, and it is expressed in a unit, Werktage, that catches out almost everyone who reads the statute for the first time. Twenty four Werktage a year does not mean twenty four days off on an ordinary five day working week.

This page works through what the statutory minimum actually comes to once converted to a real working pattern, when a new employee first qualifies for the full amount, and what happens to unused days once the calendar year ends. It also covers the two Bundesarbeitsgericht decisions that mean far more accrued leave survives past 31 December than most employees or employers assume, when leave can be paid out in cash instead of taken, and when it cannot. For a broader look at how German employment law fits together, see German law explained.

Information last verified on 19 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

The statutory minimum: 24 Werktage, not 20 or 30

§ 3 Abs. 1 BUrlG states the floor in one short sentence: leave amounts to at least 24 Werktage a year. Werktage covers every day that is not a Sunday or a statutory public holiday, so a Werktage count assumes an old fashioned six day working week running Monday through Saturday.

Almost no employment relationship in Germany today actually runs a six day week. Because the statute is anchored to that six day pattern, the 24 day figure has to be converted to whatever pattern a given employee actually works, and that conversion is the single most useful calculation on this page.

Converting Werktage to Arbeitstage

The conversion formula is straightforward once the underlying logic is clear: statutory minimum days equal 24 multiplied by the number of days actually worked per week, divided by six.

On an ordinary five day week running Monday to Friday, that is 24 times five divided by six, which equals 20 Arbeitstage. This is why almost every German job advertisement and employment contract quotes 20 days as the legal minimum, even though the statute itself never uses that number.

The same formula scales down for part time work. An employee working three fixed days a week, for example Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, gets 24 times three divided by six, which equals 12 Arbeitstage a year. An employee working four days a week gets 24 times four divided by six, which equals 16 Arbeitstage.

Minijob workers accrue leave on exactly this same pro rata basis, since a minijob is a low earnings employment relationship rather than a separate category of leave law. See Minijob for how the earnings ceiling and social security treatment interact with ordinary employment rules like this one.

Where a working pattern changes partway through the year, for example moving from three days a week to five, the statute itself does not fix a method for splitting that year's entitlement between the two patterns. Employment contracts typically address it directly, and in its absence the safer approach is to prorate month by month using each period's own weekly pattern.

Statutory minimum versus contractual leave above it

Many German contracts and Tarifverträge grant more than the statutory floor, commonly 25 to 30 Arbeitstage on a five day week. This distinction matters because the carry over and employer notice protections described below apply specifically to the statutory portion, meaning 20 days on a five day week or the applicable prorated figure.

An employer and employee are free to agree that days above that statutory floor lapse on a simpler timetable, for example strictly at year end with no notice duty attached. For that simpler rule to apply, the contract needs to say so clearly and separate the two pools of days. Where a contract does not draw that line, courts generally treat the whole entitlement as governed by the more protective statutory rules, so an employer that wants a plainer forfeiture regime for the contractual excess needs to spell it out.

The six month Wartezeit

Under § 4 BUrlG, the full statutory entitlement is acquired for the first time only after six months of continuous employment with the same employer, a waiting period known as the Wartezeit. It runs from the date the employment relationship actually began and does not reset for short breaks that do not end the relationship itself.

Before the Wartezeit is complete, a new employee does not have zero leave, but a proportional entitlement under § 5 BUrlG, covered next.

Partial year leave when starting or leaving mid year

§ 5 Abs. 1 BUrlG sets a rate of one twelfth of the annual entitlement for each full month of employment in three situations: when the Wartezeit is not completed within the calendar year of joining, when an employee leaves before ever completing the Wartezeit, and when an employee leaves in the first half of a calendar year after having completed the Wartezeit in an earlier year. § 5 Abs. 2 BUrlG then rounds any fraction of at least half a day up to a full day.

Worked example, a September start. An employee begins on 1 September on an ordinary five day week, so the full annual entitlement would be 20 Arbeitstage. By 31 December, four full months have passed and the six month Wartezeit has not been completed within that calendar year. The entitlement for that first partial year is four twelfths of 20, which is 6.67, rounded up to 7 Arbeitstage.

Worked example, leaving in April. An employee who has worked for the same employer for years resigns effective 30 April. Because the departure falls in the first half of the calendar year, that final year's entitlement is prorated to four twelfths of the annual figure rather than the full amount: four twelfths of 20 is 6.67, rounded up to 7 Arbeitstage, even though a full year would carry 20.

By contrast, an employee who instead leaves on 31 July, in the second half of the calendar year, keeps the full annual entitlement for that year under established practice, since § 5 Abs. 1 only reduces the entitlement for a departure in the first half. Whether all of those days can actually be taken before the last working day is a separate question, addressed under Abgeltung below.

§ 5 Abs. 3 BUrlG also protects an employee who took more than their prorated share of leave in the first half of the year before departing: the employer cannot claw back the corresponding pay for the days already taken.

Carry over into the next year and the 31 March deadline

§ 7 Abs. 3 BUrlG states the basic rule plainly: leave must be granted and taken within the calendar year it was earned. Transfer into the following year is permitted only where pressing operational reasons or reasons personal to the employee justify it, and where leave is transferred on that basis, it must then be granted and taken within the first three months of the following year, by 31 March, or it lapses.

That 31 March deadline is the fact most often repeated online, and it is accurate as far as it goes. What is usually missing from that shorthand is that the lapse it describes only actually happens if the employer has done something specific first, covered next.

Why leave often survives past 31 December: the employer's notice duty

Aligning German law with the EU Working Time Directive, the Bundesarbeitsgericht held on 19 February 2019, case 9 AZR 541/15, that statutory leave lapses at year end, or at the 31 March carry over deadline, only if the employer concretely and in good time told the employee how many days of leave remained and by when they had to be used, and expressly invited the employee to take them. An abstract statement, for example a boilerplate clause buried in the employment contract, does not satisfy that duty.

The court went further on 20 December 2022, case 9 AZR 266/20: the ordinary three year limitation period that would otherwise apply to a leave claim under § 195 BGB does not even begin running until the end of the year in which the employer actually gave that concrete notice. Without it, statutory leave neither lapses at year end nor becomes time barred under the normal clock set by § 199 BGB.

Put together, these two decisions mean that an employee who was never told how many days remained, and never warned that unused days would be lost, may be sitting on far more accrued statutory leave than assumed, in some cases going back several years. An employee with 10 unused statutory days from 2022 whose employer sent no leave notice that year, or in any year since, has days that have not lapsed at the end of 2022, not lapsed at 31 March 2023, and not become time barred under the usual three year clock, because that clock never started.

This notice duty is specific to the statutory minimum described above. Whether it extends to contractual days above that floor depends on how clearly the contract separated the two pools, as covered earlier.

Long term illness: leave still accrues, but not without limit

Where illness keeps someone off work, and therefore unable to take leave, for an extended stretch, EU law still treats statutory leave for that period as accruing even though the employee physically could not use it. That principle comes from the European Court of Justice in Schultz-Hoff, case C-350/06, decided 20 January 2009.

The same court later held that EU law does not prevent a national limit on how long that accrued leave can pile up. In KHS v Schulte, case C-214/10, decided 22 November 2011, it accepted a carry over period of 15 months, after which leave earned during a period of continuous incapacity lapses even without any notice from the employer, because an employer cannot meaningfully invite someone who cannot work at all to take a holiday.

The Bundesarbeitsgericht applied that reasoning domestically on 7 August 2012, case 9 AZR 353/10, reading § 7 Abs. 3 BUrlG in an EU law consistent way: statutory leave earned during long term incapacity lapses 15 months after the end of the leave year in which it arose.

Worked example. Leave earned in 2024 by an employee who becomes continuously unable to work from March 2024 onward lapses 15 months after the end of that leave year, so by 31 March 2026, regardless of whether the employer ever sent a leave notice. The illness itself, not any employer failure, is what prevented the leave from being taken, which is why the 15 month rule can override the more protective no notice, no lapse principle from the 2019 decision above.

Illness during an already approved holiday

§ 9 BUrlG addresses a narrower and more common situation: an employee falls ill during a holiday that was already approved and underway. Days of work incapacity documented by a medical certificate do not count against the annual leave entitlement. The employee generally has to notify the employer promptly, mirroring the ordinary sick leave duties described in sick leave and Entgeltfortzahlung.

The practical effect is that the missed days are credited back to the employee for use at another time, rather than being absorbed into a holiday that turned into a period of illness instead of rest.

Getting paid for unused leave: Abgeltung, only when employment ends

§ 7 Abs. 4 BUrlG allows leave that can no longer be granted, wholly or in part, because the employment relationship has ended, to be paid out in cash instead, a process called Abgeltung. This applies whatever the reason employment ended, resignation, dismissal, expiry of a fixed term, or a mutual termination agreement, so long as the remaining leave genuinely could not be taken before the last working day.

The reverse does not hold. A cash payment cannot substitute for actual leave while the employment relationship continues. An employer and employee cannot lawfully agree to a running buyout of unused days instead of time off, because that would defeat the rest and recovery purpose the statute is built around. The payout route under § 7 Abs. 4 BUrlG only opens once the relationship itself has ended.

The amount is calculated under § 11 BUrlG, based on the employee's average earnings over the 13 weeks before the leave would have begun. In practice, payroll departments commonly approximate a single day's pay as the monthly gross salary divided by roughly 21.75, the average number of working days in a month, though the statute's own 13 week average controls where the two produce different figures.

Worked example. An employment relationship ends on 31 October with 12 unused statutory Arbeitstage remaining and a monthly gross salary of EUR 3,600. Using the common approximation, EUR 3,600 divided by 21.75 comes to roughly EUR 165.50 a day, so the payout for 12 days would be in the region of EUR 1,986, subject to the actual 13 week average under § 11 BUrlG if that produces a different figure. The same buyout versus payout distinction comes up with unpaid extra hours; see overtime for how that separate question is handled.

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