Holiday entitlement in Switzerland

Holiday entitlement by age

Statutory minimums under CO art. 329a. Many contracts and collective agreements give more — the law is the floor, not the norm. Joining or leaving mid-year is calculated pro rata. As of 7 September 2026.

Weeks, not days — and why that is not a translation problem

The question almost always arrives as a day count, and the statute answers in weeks. That is deliberate drafting rather than vagueness. A rule expressed in weeks works identically for the five-day office week and the six-day week common in hospitality, because a week of holiday is defined by your own week of work.

For a full-time job on five working days, four weeks is twenty days and five weeks is twenty-five. Where six days are worked, the same four weeks is twenty-four days. Part-time does not shrink the entitlement, only its expression in days: someone working three days a week still has four weeks of holiday, which comes to twelve days. The recuperation is identical in all three cases, and only the arithmetic differs.

Irregular or on-call work is where this gets genuinely difficult, because there is no fixed weekly structure to convert from. The Code of Obligations does not prescribe a method for that case. It is a question of the specific contract and of practice, and it belongs with an advice service rather than with a general explainer.

The floor, and the article that makes it hold

Art. 329a para. 1 CO obliges the employer to allow the employee at least four weeks of holiday during each year of service, and at least five weeks for employees under twenty. The words that carry the weight are «at least»: this is a minimum, not a standard, and everything above it is a matter of contract.

What makes the minimum real is not Art. 329a but Art. 362 CO. That article lists provisions from which it is «not permissible to derogate to the detriment of the employee by individual agreement, standard employment contract or collective employment contract», and it cites the holiday rules at paragraph level: 329a paras. 1 and 3, 329b paras. 2 and 3, the whole of 329c, 329d para. 1, 329e paras. 1 and 3. Its closing paragraph states the consequence — any clause that derogates is void, not merely challengeable.

What the list leaves out is as informative as what it contains. Art. 329b para. 1, the employer's right to reduce holiday for self-inflicted absence, does not appear, so a contract or collective agreement may drop it: dropping it is not a derogation against the employee. Art. 329c, by contrast, appears with no paragraph restriction at all, which makes both the two-consecutive-weeks rule and the rule on who sets the dates fully mandatory.

The one provision you cannot waive either

The Code of Obligations has two tiers of mandatory rule, and the holiday articles are split across both. Art. 362 is one-directional: only derogations against the employee are void, and better terms are always permitted. Art. 361 lists provisions from which it is not permissible to derogate «to the detriment of either the employer or the employee» — and Art. 329d paras. 2 and 3 are on that list.

Paragraph 2 is the cash-out ban: «During the employment relationship, the holiday entitlement may not be replaced by monetary payments or other benefits.» Because it sits in Art. 361 rather than Art. 362, the employee's consent changes nothing. An arrangement to skip the holiday and take the money instead is ineffective even where the employee asked for it. The provision protects the rest, and rest is the thing money cannot substitute for.

Paragraph 1 of the same article — full salary for the holiday period plus fair compensation for lost benefits in kind — sits in the Art. 362 list instead, so it can be beaten but not undercut. Paragraph 3, also binding on both sides, covers the mirror case: an employee who does paid work for a third party during the holiday and thereby harms the employer's legitimate interests may have the holiday pay refused, or reclaimed if it has already been paid.

One qualification belongs here, or the ban reads stricter than it is applied. SECO's own holiday FAQ records that for part-time work with irregular Pensen the courts allow a holiday allowance to be paid alongside salary — but only on a formal condition: the allowance has to be shown separately both in the employment contract and on every single payslip, as a percentage or as a franc amount. A contract line saying holiday is «included in the hourly rate» is expressly not enough, and an employer who omits the disclosure risks, on the same authority, paying the holiday twice. SECO describes its answers as non-binding guidance for private-law employment and points to the civil courts for disputes. That FAQ exists in German, French and Italian only.

When holiday may be reduced, and when it expressly may not

Art. 329b CO answers the question that follows every long illness or accident. Paragraph 1 permits a reduction only where the employee is prevented from working through their own fault, and only once that absence totals more than one month in the year of service; the reduction is then one-twelfth for each full month of absence.

Paragraph 2 turns the case around. Where the total absence does not exceed one month in a year of service and results, without fault on the employee's part, from personal circumstances — the statute names illness, accident, legal obligations, public duties and leave for youth work — the employer is not entitled to reduce the entitlement at all.

Paragraph 3 places five situations entirely outside any reduction, regardless of length: incapacity through pregnancy for up to two months, maternity leave under Art. 329f, the other parent's leave and leave in the event of the mother's death under Art. 329g, carer's leave under Art. 329i, and adoption leave under Art. 329j.

Paragraph 4 allows a standard or collective employment contract to derogate from paragraphs 2 and 3, but only where it «gives employees terms of at least equal benefit» taken as a whole. In a sector covered by a collective agreement, the reduction rule therefore has to be read there and not only in the Code.

Two consecutive weeks, and who picks the dates

Art. 329c CO is two sentences long and produces more day-to-day disagreement than the duration ever does. The first: holiday for a given year of service is generally granted during that year, and at least two weeks of it must be taken consecutively. Those two consecutive weeks are an entitlement rather than a courtesy — single days scattered across the year do not discharge it.

The second sentence allocates the decision. The employer determines the timing of holidays, taking due account of the employee's wishes to the extent these are compatible with the interests of the business or household. That is the legal basis for company shutdowns and for blocked periods in seasonal businesses. Your preferred dates must be weighed; they are not a right to that particular week.

How far in advance the dates have to be fixed is not in the article, but it is in the reading SECO publishes: holiday should be set early enough to allow reasonable planning, «as a rule at least three months in advance», and employees only have to accept a short-notice postponement of dates already fixed in emergencies. The same source settles the two commonest disputes. A company shutdown may be imposed, because the employer's interest in closing for a period of the year is treated as taking priority. And where no concrete operational interest speaks against three consecutive weeks, the employer must grant them. The statutory two weeks are a floor, not a ceiling on what can be asked for in one block.

On expiry the article says nothing. It says holiday is «generally» granted during the year of service, not that it lapses otherwise. Two other provisions fill the gap: Art. 341 para. 1 CO bars a waiver of claims arising from mandatory provisions during the employment relationship and for one month after it ends, and Art. 128 no. 3 CO applies a five-year prescriptive period to claims from an employee's employment relationship. SECO's FAQ states when that period starts for holiday specifically: the five years run from the end of the year for which the holiday should have been granted. Whether and how that reaches a particular residual balance remains a case-by-case question.

Public holidays are a separate — and cantonal — calculation

The most frequent confusion on this topic is not about the number of weeks but about public holidays. They are not in the Code of Obligations at all. They are in the Labour Act, and they do not count against your holiday entitlement.

Art. 20a para. 1 of the Labour Act states two things. The national day is equated with Sunday, and the cantons «may equate at most eight further public holidays a year with Sundays and may set them differently for different parts of the canton». Federal law therefore guarantees exactly one day. Everything else is cantonal, it varies between cantons, and that closing clause expressly permits variation within a single canton too. If you commute across a cantonal border, the list that applies to you is the one for your place of work.

Paragraph 2 of the same article is little known and, for many people who have moved to Switzerland, the most useful sentence in it. An employee is entitled to stop work for religious festivals other than those recognised by the canton, provided the employer is notified at least three days in advance. The article refers on to Art. 11 of the Labour Act, which allows the employer to have the lost time made up within a reasonable period, in principle to a maximum of two hours a day. It is a right to be released from the shift, then, not automatically a right to paid time off. Paragraph 3 adds that the employer must, on request and where possible, free up the time needed to attend religious ceremonies.

Three things practice adds that the statute does not say

Three questions come up constantly and the statutory text answers none of them expressly. The first: what happens if you fall ill on holiday? On SECO's reading there is an entitlement to have holiday days re-granted so far as their recuperative purpose is defeated by illness or accident, and where that is clear in advance, an entitlement to postpone dates already fixed. The test is the defeated purpose of the rest, not the mere fact of seeing a doctor.

The second concerns holiday pay where the monthly figure is not the same every month. Art. 329d para. 1 CO speaks of «the full salary due for the holiday entitlement», which needs explaining when pay is a base plus commission, or carries shift allowances. SECO states that shift allowances form part of holiday pay where shifts are worked regularly, and that where salary payments are irregular the holiday pay is owed on the variable components too, taking the average earned over the last twelve months or another appropriate period.

The third is about age, and it is the one most often assumed rather than checked. The Code contains exactly one age threshold: the five weeks up to the completed twentieth year. The widespread belief that more is automatically due from fifty has no basis in the Code. It comes from contractual practice, and SECO describes it in those terms — collective and individual employment contracts frequently grant employees from the age of 50 a higher entitlement, often five weeks. Frequently is not the same as owed, and where it applies it applies because of the contract, not because of the statute.

How Swiss adverts write the number — and it is not in days

There is a measurable habit here that matters if you are reading Swiss adverts with a foreign eye. Among the adverts currently listed on SwissJobs.app that state a holiday figure with a unit, 84.4 per cent state it in weeks and only 15.6 per cent in days. Counted by advertiser rather than by advert, 27.7 per cent use a day figure at least once — so the day count is a minority habit of particular employers rather than a language of the market.

The practical consequence is that «25 days» and «five weeks» are the same offer, and the second is the Swiss way of saying it. If you are comparing offers against an entitlement you know in days from another country, convert everything to weeks first, using the working week each job actually has. Comparing a day figure from a six-day week against one from a five-day week is comparing two different amounts of rest.

One more pattern in the same data is worth naming because it explains why so few adverts carry any figure at all. Adverts that state a holiday figure come disproportionately from employers running many vacancies at once: 76.6 per cent of them come from employers with ten or more adverts live, against 62.7 per cent of the base as a whole. Stating the number is a recruitment-marketing decision that large employers make more often. Silence in a small employer's advert says nothing about the entitlement it offers.

Where more than four weeks comes from

Above the statutory floor there are three sources, and they bind differently. The first is the individual contract, which simply agrees a higher figure. The second is a collective employment contract, which applies to businesses within its scope whether or not the individual contract mentions it — so it is worth establishing whether your sector has one. The third is a company-wide scheme, most often a ladder by age or years of service.

What such a ladder looks like can be read at the country's largest public-sector employer. Art. 67 para. 1 of the Federal Personnel Ordinance gives federal employees, per calendar year, six weeks up to and including the calendar year in which they turn 20, five weeks from the year in which they turn 21, six weeks from the year in which they turn 50, and seven weeks from the year in which they turn 60. The Confederation gives its own staff more than federal law requires private employers to give, at every age.

Two further details in that ordinance are instructive for private-sector employees, because they show which questions a holiday policy actually has to answer. Paragraph 2 requires holidays to be scheduled so that «the flow of work is not impaired and recuperation is assured» — both conditions, not just the first. And paragraph 3 works in calendar years, not years of service: holiday is to be taken in the calendar year in which the entitlement arises, and only where that is impossible for compelling operational reasons or because of illness or accident may it be taken the following year. The Code of Obligations sets no such deadline; that one belongs to federal personnel law.

If the figure in the contract does not add up

Where a contract states less than four weeks, the consequence is written into the statute rather than left to negotiation. Under the closing paragraph of Art. 362 CO the clause is void, and the statutory rule takes its place. Void means it never had effect; there is no window within which it has to be challenged.

Art. 341 para. 1 CO adds a second layer for mandatory provisions: for the duration of the employment relationship and for one month after its end, the employee may not waive claims arising from mandatory provisions of law or of a collective employment contract. Paragraph 2 confirms that the general rules on prescriptive periods apply to claims under the employment relationship, and Art. 128 no. 3 CO puts that period at five years.

This page explains what the articles say, and deliberately stops short of telling you what to do. How a particular contract, a particular collective agreement and a particular absence interact is a question about your case, not about the statute. The bodies that answer it are the enforcement office of your collective agreement, a trade union, the cantonal conciliation authority for employment disputes, or a legal advice service — and for public-sector employment, the personnel law of your canton or municipality, which may depart from the Code of Obligations.