This is how vacation entitlement is calculated for part-time work

All employees have at least four weeks vacation every year – that’s what the law requires. It is also important that this holiday must be paid: “Every employee is entitled to paid vacation time in every calendar year,” says paragraph 1 of the Federal Holidays Act (BUrlG). Paragraph 3 BUrlG further specifies that there must always be at least 24 vacation days, including Saturdays. It is also important for full-time employees that the full holiday entitlement only applies to an employer after six months and that there are only limited days off before that.

Two factors determine the calculation of part-time leave entitlement

So far so good. But how is holiday entitlement calculated for part-time employees? The Northern Black Forest Chamber of Industry and Commerce provides part-time employees with a formula for calculating vacation days:

Vacation days per year / usual working days * actual working days per week

So if a company has 30 vacation days with a 5-day week, this calculation results in 18 vacation days for employees with a 3-day week in the same company.
But that’s not all. After all, if you work part-time but spend four hours in the office on five days instead of eight hours per day, for example, you have the same holiday entitlement as full-time employees.

The above calculation therefore only refers to the time factor, i.e. the days off themselves. How the holiday is paid, on the other hand, is calculated on the basis of the weekly working hours. For this calculation, the average earnings of the last 13 weeks or the last three months are used. With the formula

Total earnings from the last 13 weeks / number of hours worked during this period

So the hourly wage is calculated. According to the monthly or weekly number of hours agreed in the employment contract, part-time employees are paid this hourly wage during vacation.

If you are still not sure how much holiday entitlement you actually have after these calculations, you can ask your employer’s human resources department. The holiday entitlement is often regulated in the employment contract. Good to know here: “Fractions of vacation days that make up at least half a day are to be converted into full vacation days.” (Section 5 BUrlG)

There is no legal regulation for the calculation of holiday entitlement in the case of flexible working hours

However, things can get complicated when part-time employees have flexible working hours and work different numbers of hours on different days each week. If the part-time employees, when asking for vacation time, argue that they often only worked two and a half days with a lot of hours each and therefore only want to spend two and a half paid vacation days for a whole week off, a dispute with the employer quickly arises.

Because: In this case there is no legal regulation. The only thing that is clear is that part-time employees with flexible working hours also have holiday entitlements that are based on the holiday entitlements of full-time employees. The German lawyer hotline DAHAG suggests using the following formula to calculate holiday entitlement for flexible working hours:

Vacation days per year / annual working days * compulsory working days per year

It is important here that this is only a suggestion and the employer must always agree to the calculation. For this reason, the holiday entitlement is often regulated in the employment contract. Another possible calculation would be that part-time employees who work flexibly have the same number of vacation days as full-time employees, but are only paid during vacation (as usual) according to the contractually agreed monthly or weekly working hours.

For a part-time employee with 20 working hours per week, this would result in a vacation entitlement of six weeks (time factor) in the example company above with 30 vacation days at a 5-day week and an hourly wage of 15 euros. To calculate the money factor, all hours (a total of 120 hours in this example) are distributed evenly over the 30 days of vacation and paid with 15 euros each. In this calculation, each day of vacation is considered as a working day with four working hours and is therefore remunerated with 60 euros. This is not a problem, as according to Section 7 BUrlG, the entire vacation in the current year must be taken – the hours are paid for in any case.

Olga Rogler / Editor finanzen.net

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