What are G-days? And who has the right to it? Find out more about the rules regarding compensation for termination or reduction of fixed working hours.
What are G-days?
G-days are the compensation that the employee is entitled to in the event of a termination or reduction in fixed working hours, for which the employee is of course not to blame for. This applies if the employee has been paid for 74 hours within 4 weeks up to the employee’s termination. However, the term “G-days” can be misleading – in reality it should be read as e.g. daily allowance or employer’s allowance.
In the event of termination for which the employee is not at fault, you have the right to be paid up to two G-days on the first two days of unemployment. Please note that the right to G-days expires if you are offered work by the employer, but refuse the offer. One G-day corresponds to the highest daily allowance rate, i.e. DKK 911 (in 2023), per day, while half a day corresponds to DKK 456 per day. day:
Who has the right to G-days
In order to be eligible for G-days you must live up to the employment requirements and have unemployment insurance. Every employment insurance and workers union have information about G-days on their website but it is important to state that the rules do not differ from industry to industry – they are the same for everyone.
Employers’ unemployment benefits for G-days anno 2024:
- Full unemployment benefit: 940 kr./pr.day
- Half unemployment benefit: 470 kr./pr.day
Requirements for an unemployment insurance fund
You must be a member of an unemployment insurance fund
First of all you have to be a member of an unemployment insurance fund by the end of the employment.
You must be an employee
You also have to be an employee to get G-days. If you receive back pay, you are also entitled to payment for G-days upon termination of work.
Therefore, you cannot receive G-days after ceasing to work a self-employed business.
Requirements for working time
To be eligible for G-days, you have to have worked for a minimum of 74 hours for the same employer within at least 4 weeks.
Employment types
Permanent employment
If you have been employed in a permanent employment relationship and are dismissed, you are undoubtedly entitled to G-days. But even if the rules also apply to this type of employment, these are not what G-days are intended for – quite the contrary.
G-days must be an incentive for the employer to employ the employee permanently on better terms than a casual employment, where G-days come into play to a much greater extent.
An important point, however, is that if you reduce the number of hours (or are dismissed and re-employed in a new position with a lower number of hours), you will still be entitled to G-days based on the rules of half and full days.
Employed on a reduced time basis (part-time)
If you are employed on a fixed reduced-time basis and have days completely or partially without work, you are not considered to have resigned, as there is typically a notice of termination in the contract, while at the same time there is the prospect of work after the days off.
Overtime is not part of the fixed working hours, and if you have worked more hours for a period than you are employed for, it will not be considered unemployment when you again reach the number of hours stated in the employment contract. This means that you are not entitled to G-days. Here, it is the contract that sets the standard.
Contractual employee
If you only get paid for work done, it is a casual employment, and thus you have no notice of termination. Thus, you are considered terminated on each day of unemployment, and if you otherwise meet the other requirements, you will be entitled to G-days.
Substitute
If you, as a substitute, do not have a shift plan or work planned in any other way at the end of the working day, you are considered to have resigned, every day at the end of the working day. The employer must therefore pay for G-days if you have worked 74 paid hours within the last 4 weeks. However, there is a limit to the number of times your employer can pay out G-days. For each calendar year, they may pay G-days no more than 16 times. On these days, as an employee, you may not receive daily allowance.
Regardless of whether the workplace calls almost every morning and offers you work, you are dismissed if you have not been presented with the work in advance before going home the day before. It may seem illogical, but you are nevertheless entitled to the payments. If, for example, you work as a substitute teacher, it can quickly be more than half a month’s salary that you have the right to be paid in addition to your salary for the work done.
Should a dispute arise as to whether the employer had offered new work before the original termination of employment, it is the documentation for this that will decide the dispute. This documentation can come in many forms and must always be assessed. The key is that the employer must be able to document having offered new work.
For companies that use booking calendars to distribute their work between employees, it applies that if a shift has not been offered personally to an employee, it cannot be said that the employee has been offered work, and thus you will again be right for G-days. Even if the employee has not made himself available on a given day in a booking system, the right to G-days does not expire, unless the employer has actively offered the employee new employment.
Sent home
Although it cannot be considered a termination if an employee is sent home, it may in fact also give the right to G-days. It requires that it follows the rules in the collective agreement or “professional custom” if you are not on a collective agreement. In addition, it naturally requires that you are not paid a salary for your repatriation. If the repatriation is due to force majeure, the right to G-days expires.
When disagreements arise
The rules for G-days are not always followed. There can be several reasons for this, says Finn Holst Villadsen from FOA.
“It is actually not very often that we experience complaints from members about non-payment of G-days, but there is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio between the number of complaints and the number of non-payments – on the contrary,” says Finn Holst Villadsen and elaborates:
“I don’t have figures for how big the missing G-day payment is, but previous investigations show that it is a lot of money. We have experienced that employers have written in employment contracts that they do not pay G-days [which is not legal, ed.]. A number of private employers fail to pay out, but whether it is an oversight or ill will is probably difficult to determine. It is especially in the field of temporary workers that there are problems, and the biggest of these is that the temporary workers themselves do not ask to be paid G-days for fear that they will no longer be offered work,” he says.
According to Finn Holst Villadsen, disputes most often concern whether the employee himself is to blame for the termination of employment and whether the employment requirement has been met. Incidentally, you always have documentation for the latter if you use a time registration tool such as Intempus. Finn Holst Villadsen goes on to say that it is the Danish Appeals Board’s Employment Committee that decides disputes, and that it is very rare for the unemployment insurance fund and unions to lose cases about G-days. If your employer does not want to pay your G-days, and the unemployment insurance fund otherwise agrees that you are entitled to them, the unemployment insurance fund will pay for the G-days and proceed to claim them from the employer itself.
Intempus can handle G-days
With Intempus you can easily keep track of the administrative matters regarding G-days, just as you can pull out reports yourself that give you the full overview. You are always welcome to contact us on +45 26390400 for more information on how we can help you and your company. We are also happy to provide a free demo of the system so that you can get a feel for how we can facilitate administration for you:
