§1 Minimum paid annual leave of 4 weeks

Four weeks of paid annual leave per year is a minimum provision. During that period, ‘a worker must normally be entitled to actual rest, with a view to ensuring effective protection of his health and safety’ (215). The annual leave entitlement is four weeks, meaning that workers must be freed from their work obligations for four calendar weeks, irrespective whether they work full-time or part-time. When converting the four weeks of paid annual leave into a number of working days during which the worker is freed from his work obligations, ‘the entitlement to minimum paid annual leave, within the meaning of Directive 2003//88, must be calculated by reference to the days, hours and/or fractions of days or hours worked and specified in the contract of employment’ (216). The Court has ruled that ‘as regards the accrual of entitlement to paid annual leave, it is necessary to distinguish periods during which the worker worked according to different work patterns, the number of units of annual leave accumulated in relation to the number of units worked to be calculated for each period separately’ (217). In cases such as short-time working where the employment relationship continues but the worker does not perform actual work for the employer, the Court has ruled that a worker may acquire entitlement to paid annual leave only during the periods during which he or she performed actual work (pro rata temporis). No entitlement to leave is acquired during the periods when no work was performed (218). Similarly, workers do not acquire entitlements to paid annual leave during periods of parental leave (219). Where workers change from full to part-time employment, the Court has ruled that it would be incompatible with the Directive to apply the pro rata temporis principle retrospectively to the right to annual leave accumulated during a period of full-time work as this would entail a loss of some accumulated rights (220). So a reduction in working hours cannot reduce the right to annual leave that the worker has already accumulated (221). In the contrary situation where a worker moves from part to full-time, a new entitlement must in any case be calculated for the period after the increase in working hours, following the pro rata temporis principle (222). The Directive does not affect the Member States’ right to apply provisions that would be more favourable to the protection of the safety and health of workers (223), including granting workers more than four weeks of paid leave per year. In such cases, the Member State may establish different conditions for entitlement to and granting of the additional leave (224) without being required, in that regard, to comply with the protective rules which the Court has laid down in respect of that minimum period (225). For example, the Court has held that, when deciding to grant workers’ rights to paid annual leave beyond that minimum period of four weeks, Member States are not obliged to grant an allowance in lieu (see below under point VII.B) for untaken leave entitlements at the end of the employment relationship which exceed four weeks (226). Similarly, the Court has held that Member States are free to grant days of paid annual leave which exceed the minimum period of four weeks, and yet exclude the carry-over of those days of leave on the grounds of illness (227). In cases of short-time working arrangement where the pro rata temporis principle applies to the accrual of right, the Court has also held that Member States can give workers the right to more paid annual leave than that guaranteed by the Directive, irrespective of their working time having been reduced on account of short-time working (228). Although such situations fall outside the scope of Article 7 of the Directive and Article 31(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (229), the provisions of national law which are more favourable to workers cannot be used to compensate for a possible infringement of the minimum protection guaranteed by the provision of EU law (230).

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07