Untaken holidays expire after six months.
Every employee has a legal right to 4 times his or her working hours per week in holiday hours. For example, if an employee works 20 hours a week, this employee is entitled to 80 (4 x 20 hours) statutory holiday hours. All holiday hours granted above this are known as super-legal holiday hours.
The aforementioned statutory holiday hours expire within six months of the calendar year in which they were accrued. Suppose the employee in our example has already taken 20 statutory holiday hours in 2022, her remaining 60 statutory holiday hours will then expire on 1 July 2023. If the employee has not taken the statutory holiday hours before 1 July 2023, as an employer you may write these hours off. You then also do not have to pay them out to the employee.
Extra-legal holiday hours are subject to a five-year limitation period.
Warning
As an employer, if you want to write off statutory holiday hours, a duty of care does apply that employees have been adequately warned that their holiday hours are about to lapse. In other words, as an employer, you must notify in writing the employee who still has statutory holiday hours outstanding at the time of publishing this article that his or her statutory holiday hours will lapse if they are not taken before 1 July 2023.
Coulance
Any applicable collective agreement may deviate from the six-month expiry period for statutory holiday hours. So please pay attention to that. Furthermore, if the employee had no opportunities in 2022 and before 1 July 2023 to take the statutory holiday hours (e.g. due to extreme busyness, which made it impossible to take holidays), then as an employer you cannot let the statutory holiday hours lapse as of 1 July. In that case, the statutory holiday hours will remain outstanding even after 1 July because, as an employer, you then failed to offer the employees the opportunity to use up the statutory holidays. The statutory holidays will then lapse only after 5 years as is also the case for the non-statutory ones.
Sick employee
Sick employees accrue holiday hours just like “healthy” employees. As an employer, it is wise to also encourage these employees to take holiday hours. A long-term sick employee should also take holidays (free of reintegration activities). Thus, the 1 July deadline for statutory holiday hours also simply applies to these employees. This may be different if the sick employee really cannot enjoy holidays, e.g. because employee has been hospitalised.