When is a company holiday allowed?
For an employee to be allowed to order a company holiday (Betriebsurlaub), there have to be important operational reasons. That means the circumstances must have a direct effect on employees' daily work. A company holiday can therefore only be ordered if employees can no longer do their work for particular reasons.
There are various scenarios in which a whole business can end up going on holiday:
Order situation
A classic reason for a company holiday is the order situation. In some industries there are predictable, recurring periods in which there is little work coming in. During that period it is not worth the business keeping employees occupied. Such a period is usually between Christmas and New Year, or during the regional summer holidays.
Building work
If extensive building work is taking place at the business that would prevent employees from doing their daily work, a company holiday can likewise be ordered. That can be for reasons of space, but also for health reasons.
The employer themselves
In medical practices in particular, the company holiday is a big topic: when the employer themselves goes away. In that case employees cannot do their daily work while the employer is absent and therefore have to take vacation themselves, whether they want to or not. In medical practices, for example, no patients can be treated when the only doctor is on vacation.
Customers
Customers can be a reason for a company holiday too. If there is only a single customer, for instance, and that customer takes their own company holiday, that brings the business to a standstill as well. The same can happen with suppliers. If essential materials are not delivered because the supplier is on their company holiday, employees' work is severely affected too and that can lead to a company holiday.
How long may a company holiday be under the law?
First things first: the law does not prescribe a maximum length for a company holiday. As a rule, the employment contract does not lay down anything specific either. In theory it could therefore take up all of the employees' vacation days. However: according to the Federal Court of Justice, around one fifth of the total vacation days is appropriate. Employees must still be able to choose further vacation outside the company holiday freely, and with it the period in which they take that vacation.
In concrete terms that means that with, say, 25 vacation days a year, 5 vacation days may be claimed by the employer for the company holiday - but as a rule it should not be more than two weeks.
How far in advance must a company holiday be announced?
Informing people about a company holiday early is a duty. If the notice period is not observed, that can have serious consequences for the employer. So that employees can plan their own vacation as well, the company holiday has to be announced in good time. A few weeks in advance is therefore not enough.
Here too, though: there is no statutory notice period for a company holiday, only a recommended framework of at least 6 months.
If those six months are not observed, it can have consequences for the employer: if the employer announces the company holiday at fairly short notice, they cannot, for example, withdraw vacation days that have already been approved. And even where employees have no vacation days available at the point when the company holiday is announced, the employer is limited in what they can do: they can either have their employees work through the period of the planned company holiday anyway or they go ahead with the enforced vacation and keep paying employees as usual.
How is a company holiday counted?
A company holiday is not calculated separately from employees' vacation days. Those days count as normal vacation days and are deducted from the annual allowance. But that also means the days spent on the company holiday are paid in exactly the same way as normal vacation days.
Important: if employees fall ill during the company holiday, the same rules apply as during voluntary vacation: the days on which the employee is signed off sick do not count as vacation days. Find out more about this here
Get a better overview with digital tools
The subject of company holidays can therefore turn into a small arithmetic exercise for you as an employer: do my employees still have enough vacation days left so that we can take a company holiday this year? When do I schedule the company holiday, and how do I make sure I do not lose track? We have a simple answer to that question: clockin.
With clockin you always have an overview of your company's vacation planning. In the digital calendar you can enter the company holiday as an absence of its own. Your employees see the same dates at a glance directly in their smartphone app. clockin also keeps track of all the vacation days your employees have taken and still have open. Instead of pen and paper or an Excel spreadsheet, here you can always see how many vacation days your employees have left, thanks to digital vacation requests and the way they are processed.
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