⚠️ This article explains the law in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In your country, different rules apply.
Here it applies to the software as well. Zirko knows a statutory minimum entitlement only for these three countries. If your business is based elsewhere, your value stays exactly as you enter it — check it yourself against the law of your country.
Below the working time models there is a default value for the leave entitlement. It applies to every newly created employee.
If you leave it empty, Zirko inserts the statutory entitlement of your country. If you enter a value below the law, Zirko raises it to the statutory level — and tells you so. A business that enters 18 days should not get 18 days and only find out in court.
Why the value sits with the working hours
The statutory entitlement is a number of weeks. How many working days a week has is decided by the working time model one card further up. With a four-day week there are fewer leave days than with a five-day week — the same time off, a different number.
Germany
24 working days from Monday to Saturday, § 3 Abs. 1 BUrlG (the German Federal Leave Act). With a five-day week that is 20 working days. Public holidays are excluded from the German concept of working days.
Austria
30 working days from Monday to Saturday, § 2 Abs. 1 UrlG (the Austrian Leave Act). With a five-day week that is 25 working days. Unlike in Germany, public holidays count as working days here.
Both countries say “working days” and mean different things. That is why Zirko never stores just the bare number but always what it refers to as well. For you that means: the number of days shown has already been converted to your week — you do not have to recalculate anything.
Switzerland
Four weeks, Art. 329a OR (the Swiss Code of Obligations). With a five-day week that is 20 working days.
For employees up to their 20th birthday it is five weeks. Zirko does not know the age of your employees and cannot set this automatically — enter the higher value by hand for those people.
What you should check afterwards
- Does every person have a working time model? Without a model, the “Working hours” column in the list is empty.
- Do the weekly hours in the overview match the contract? The list shows them as “38 hrs per week” — the quickest check.
- Is the right federal state, or the right canton, selected for the public holidays? A wrong one shifts several days every year.