Spring is always characterised by many public holidays around Easter and Ascension Day. Most of us look forward to these holidays as a break from everyday life, but it can be difficult to understand what the rules say about public holidays. We've looked into it.
As an employee, are you entitled to paid holidays? And how does it work if you are one of those who still have to work during public holidays?
When it comes to understanding public holiday rules, one concept is essential: public holiday.
Search holiday is the term for public holidays that fall on a weekday. You may have heard of FO days, SH days off or odd holidays instead. These are all terms for the same thing. In this text we use the term public holiday.
Every year there are a number of fixed public holidays. These are:
- Maundy Thursday
- Good Friday
- 2nd Easter Sunday (Monday)
- Ascension Day (Thursday)
- Pentecost (Monday)
There are also other public holidays that may fall on weekdays, depending on the year. These are:
- 1 Christmas Day (25 December)
- 2nd Christmas Day (26 December)
- New Year's Day (1 January)
Are you entitled to time off on a public holiday?
One of the key words when looking at the rules for work and pay on public holidays is collective agreement. To a large extent, the rules are individual. It's all about the conditions under which the individual is employed, i.e. their terms of employment and/or collective labour agreement.
But for our society to function, some groups need to work all year round - even on public holidays.
If you are one of those who work on public holidays, you should therefore be aware that you are entitled to at least your usual pay for the hours. However, you may also be entitled to a special supplement per hour when working on public holidays. This primarily applies to employees covered by a collective labour agreement. The collective agreement will state whether you are entitled to a supplement and if so, how much. The allowance is also known as Collective agreement allowance.
It's important to remember that in order to be entitled to holiday pay, it must be stated in either an employment contract, a collective agreement or an employee handbook.
Are you entitled to paid time off on a public holiday?
Whether or not you are entitled to be paid despite being off on a public holiday depends on several things. In addition to what is stated in your collective agreement or terms of employment, it also depends on whether you are a salaried or hourly employee.
If you are salaried employee, you are entitled to receive your full monthly or weekly salary - regardless of whether or not there are public holidays during the pay period.
If you are hourly paid, You should be aware that it works differently. If you want to be paid for time off on public holidays as an hourly paid employee, you need to pay into a bank holiday savings - i.e. in an SH account or a Free Choice Salary account.
But how does it work in practice? The public holiday savings are calculated as a percentage of the employee's holiday pay, and the payment is made automatically at each payroll run. When the public holiday falls, the employee receives an amount from the account to cover the hours they cannot work because the company is closed on a public holiday. It is the employer's responsibility to continuously save an amount for the employee's public holiday savings.
However, the scheme is not mandatory. Therefore, as an employee, you can only get the savings scheme for public holidays if it is agreed in your collective agreement or if the workplace has agreed to start the scheme.
What if you're not covered by a collective agreement?
Without a collective labour agreement, it still applies that salaried employees should receive their full salary. Hourly paid employees, on the other hand, can generally be deducted from salary if there is nothing else that is customary in the company or is part of your company policy.
Without a collective agreement, the employee is at a disadvantage when it comes to, for example, allowances for working on public holidays and the right to time off.
The collective agreement is therefore important for the hourly worker to secure income for the days when the company is closed due to public holidays.
If you're not covered by a collective agreement, there may be clauses in your employment contract that ensure that you have the right to both receive money in your account and sit around the Easter table during the holidays.
Intempus helps with the overview
Yes, there are a lot of ’ifs’ and ’buts’ in the rules about pay and working on public holidays. The best thing you can do as an employee and employer in the first instance is to check the applicable collective labour agreement, if you have one. It's a good guideline for what to do when public holidays take over the spring weeks.
Intempus helps you keep track of who's working and who's off - whether it's a public holiday or not.
In addition to employees being able to register their hours, it's also ideal to use Intempus to register days off and holidays. This gives the administrator a much better overview of who is still at work and who is sitting at home with the family around the Easter table.
If you have collective agreement allowances in connection with public holidays, Intempus can help ensure that the right allowance is paid to employees who have worked on public holidays. This is done by Intempus automatically generating a SH report before the public holiday itself. This means that 1 SH day or 7.4 SH hours are reported, and the payroll system then ensures that the correct supplement/rate is paid.
This means that the company administrator and the employee do not have to manually enter public holiday reports for each employee. This saves both parties time, hassle and inconsistencies - and that's something you want to avoid on a public holiday.
Do you have questions about public holidays? Or would you like to learn more about how Intempus can make it easier to manage public holidays for your business? Then contact us at +45 26390400 or book a no-obligation demo:
