When illness affects your holiday

Illness can quickly disrupt an employee’s holiday plans and ruin long-awaited time for rest and relaxation. The Holidays Act allows employees to postpone holiday days in the event of illness, but this is subject to certain documentation requirements and deadlines. Both employers and employees should be familiar with these rules.

Illness before your holiday: may require to postpone your holiday

If an employee is completely incapacitated for work before the holiday begins, the employee may demand that the entire holiday is postponed until later in the year.

Holidays are not automatically postponed. The employee must ask the employer to postpone the holiday and provide a medical certificate at the latest on the last working day the employee would have worked before the holiday. As the holiday is then postponed, the employee must report to work when the sick leave expires. If the employee only wishes to postpone a part of the holiday, the employee may take the remaining holiday as planned after the sick leave expires. See the section below on illness during holidays.

Sickness during your holiday: may require to postpone parts of your holiday

An employee who becomes completely incapacitated for work during their holiday may demand a part of their holiday be postponed. This applies to a corresponding number of working days as the number of days the employee was ill during the holiday.

As in the case of illness prior to holiday, the employee must ask the employer for a postponement. The employee must request this and present a medical certificate of incapacity for work as soon as the employee has recovered and returned to work. Employees are normally given some leeway on this deadline. However, in order for the employee to be able to request a postponement after returning to work for more than 14 days, the employee must have good reasons.

Sickness benefits and holiday pay for the same period?

An employee who is sick during their holiday is not entitled to both sickness benefits and holiday pay for the same period. If the employee does not request to postpone the holiday within the deadline, the employee is not entitled to sickness benefit for these days. If, on the other hand, the employee asks to postpone the holiday in time, the employee may be entitled to sickness benefit in the usual way.

When should postponed holiday be taken?

If the holiday was scheduled for the main holiday period (1 June to 30 September), the employee cannot demand to take the postponed holiday during this period.

As with other holidays, it is the employer who decides when the postponed holiday should be taken, after discussion with the employee.

The employer and employee may agree to postpone up to 12 working days of holiday until the following year. Note that the term “working day” is used differently in the Holidays Act than in the common parlance. According to the Holidays Act, a working day is any day that is not a Sunday or public holiday. For employees with five working days per week, 12 working days constitute two weeks of holiday. If the employee has not taken all the holidays required by the Holidays Act by the end of the year, the unused holidays will be transferred to the following year.

Agreed holiday in excess of the Holidays Act minimum (25 working days)

Note that the employee’s right to postpone holiday due to illness generally applies to the statutory holiday, i.e. four weeks and one day. However, the employee may be entitled to postpone holiday that has been agreed beyond the statutory minimum requirements. This applies, for example, if the employment contract stipulates that the rules of the Holidays Act apply to all holidays, or if it otherwise appears that the employee is entitled to postpone these holidays due to illness. In any case, the employer and the employee may agree in each individual case that the employee may postpone the holiday.