Urlaub beantragen — Applying for Leave

Leave, the March deadline, and the day everyone wants off

German holiday entitlement is generous by international standards and hedged with rules that are worth knowing before you lose days to them. The statutory floor is four weeks: the Bundesurlaubsgesetz grants twenty-four working days on a six-day week, which is twenty days if you work five. Almost no one actually has twenty. Most contracts give twenty-five to thirty, thirty is normal in the public sector and at larger employers, and a collectively agreed Tarifvertrag frequently sets more. Public holidays are separate and do not come out of your allowance — and because they are set by each Bundesland rather than nationally, how many you get depends on where you work, which lesson 97 takes up. The rule that costs people days is the carry-over. Leave belongs to its calendar year. Days not taken may be carried into the next year only in limited circumstances, and where they are, they normally have to be used by the thirty-first of March, after which they lapse. That is the Ende März in the dialogue, and it is why German offices empty out in the first quarter. There is an important qualification: following European and then German case law, unused leave does not simply vanish if the employer never told the employee they had days left and warned them the days would expire. So a quiet lapse is not automatically lawful — but do not rely on it. Check your balance in January. Two scheduling institutions shape when you can actually go. der Betriebsurlaub is a shutdown: the whole establishment closes and everyone takes leave at the same time, common in manufacturing and in smaller family firms, and it is deducted from your days whether or not the timing suits you. Its opposite is die Urlaubssperre, a period when applications will be refused because the work cannot be left — the weeks before a deadline, the Christmas trade in retail, a system migration in IT. And between them sits the competition for der Brückentag, the single working day between a public holiday and the weekend, which turns four days off into a week for the cost of one and is therefore gone from the calendar months in advance. Plan those early or not at all. Finally, the etiquette. Leave is applied for and approved, not announced, and the approval is expected to arrive before you commit money — Herr Krause's warning about booking is standard advice rather than a threat. Arranging your own Vertretung before you ask is regarded as part of making the request properly, and coming with cover already agreed makes approval close to automatic. Once you are away, the German norm is genuinely away: not reading email on leave is respected rather than suspicious, an Abwesenheitsnotiz naming your Vertretung is expected, and a colleague who contacts you about work during your Urlaub is the one behaving oddly. That norm is one of the better things about working here and it is worth adopting rather than resisting.