§2 Parental leave and other types of leave protected by EU law

The Court has ruled on parental leave in the context of the Framework Agreement on parental leave (322), which has since been repealed by Directive (EU) 2019/1158 (323). Article 10(1) of Directive (EU) 2019/1158 on work-life balance for parents and carers provides that rights acquired or in the process of being acquired by the worker on the date on which, inter alia (324), parental leave starts are to be maintained as they stand until the end of parental leave and apply after that leave. That provision is intended to avoid the loss of or reduction in rights derived from an employment relationship, to which workers are entitled when they start parental leave, and to ensure that, at the end of that leave, they will find themselves in the same situation as when it started. The Court has ruled that the right to paid annual leave is one of the rights derived directly from the employment relationship of every worker. Thus, the entitlement to annual leave accumulated during the period preceding the start of parental leave cannot lapse while being on parental leave (325). Even though a worker on parental leave remains, during that period, a worker for the purposes of EU law, the employment relationship can be suspended pursuant to national law, thus suspending the reciprocal obligations of the parties (326). In such a case ‘the period of parental leave taken by the worker concerned during the reference period cannot be treated as a period of actual work for the purpose of determining that worker’s entitlement to paid annual leave under Article 7 of Directive 2003/88’ (327). Should other forms of leave be introduced in EU law, the Commission considers that the principle established by the Court that ‘a period of leave guaranteed by EU law cannot affect the right to take another period of leave guaranteed by that law’ (328) would apply. If periods of different types of leave protected by EU law coincide, this could entail carrying forward annual leave, or part of it, to the following year.

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