Annual leave and public holidays in Luxembourg 2026

How much annual leave and public holidays in Luxembourg?

Annual leave and public holidays in Luxembourg form a statutory floor of 26 working days of paid leave per year and 11 legal public holidays, regardless of the employee's age; a collective agreement, internal rules or the employment contract may grant more, never less.

The figure of 26 days is not a market average but a mandatory minimum. The Inspection du travail et des mines recalls that the minimum duration of annual recreation leave was raised from 25 to 26 working days with effect from 1 January 2019, and that this duration applies without regard to age. The Chambre des salariés confirms that 26 working days are a floor which a collective agreement may increase.

The notion of a working day is the first source of error in a payroll count, because it does not match the working week. Working days are all calendar days except Sundays and legal public holidays: Saturday is therefore a working day in Luxembourg, even for an employee who never works on Saturdays. Guichet.lu draws the practical consequence: one week of leave counts as five working days, including for an employee working more than five days a week. For part-time staff, leave is prorated against the agreed weekly hours.

We regularly see payroll files where the leave balance shown in the client's HR tool was built in worked days, then compared with a statutory floor expressed in working days. The two counters do not speak the same language, and the gap surfaces when an employee leaves and claims an indemnity on the statutory basis. Rebuilding one person's counter over three financial years takes half a day; doing it for a whole workforce in the middle of a dispute takes several.

What are the 11 legal public holidays and their 2026 dates?

The 11 legal public holidays in Luxembourg are New Year's Day, Easter Monday, Labour Day, Europe Day, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, National Day, Assumption, All Saints' Day and the two days of Christmas. Europe Day on 9 May was added by the law of 25 April 2019, taking the total from ten to eleven.

Four of these days move with the date of Easter: Easter Monday, Ascension Day and Whit Monday depend on it directly. The other seven are fixed calendar dates, which means that the weekday they fall on, and therefore their real cost to the employer, changes every year. Whit Sunday, often listed by mistake in staffing plans, is not among the legal public holidays.

The table below sets out the 2026 dates published by the Inspection du travail et des mines, and adds the consequence for an employee whose contract provides for a Monday-to-Friday week. It is that third column which must feed payroll, not the list of dates alone.

Does a public holiday falling on a Saturday or Sunday create a right?

Yes: in Luxembourg a legal public holiday coinciding with a working day on which the employee would not have worked anyway under the contract gives entitlement to one compensatory day off, to be granted within three months starting the day after the public holiday. A public holiday falling on a Sunday gives the same entitlement.

This is the rule that costs the most when it is overlooked, precisely because it applies to the days a staffing plan already treats as free. Since Saturday is a working day in Luxembourg, a Saturday public holiday is not absorbed into the weekend of an employee working Monday to Friday: it triggers a compensatory day. For a public holiday falling on a Sunday, Guichet.lu specifies that the compensatory day is taken at the employee's convenience within the three-month period, and must be taken in kind, with no option to cash it in.

Applied to the 2026 calendar, the rule produces four compensatory days for a Monday-to-Friday contract: Europe Day on Saturday 9 May, Assumption on Saturday 15 August, All Saints' Day on Sunday 1 November and the second day of Christmas on Saturday 26 December. Four days per employee, across a workforce of twenty, means eighty days to schedule or to pay: no longer a payroll detail.

The three-month deadline is not an absolute cut-off. Where the needs of the business prevent the leave from being taken within that period, it must be granted before the end of the calendar year; for November and December public holidays, it may be taken in the first three months of the following year. Failing that, the employee is entitled to the remuneration corresponding to the duration of the leave. In 2026 this means in practice that the compensation for All Saints' Day and for 26 December may be taken until 31 March 2027, while those for 9 May and 15 August must be cleared within the year.

One point on liability deserves attention, because it reverses what many directors assume. In a judgment of 28 May 2020 published in the case-law section of the Inspection du travail et des mines, the Court of Appeal held that it is for the employer to ensure that the employee takes the compensatory day within the statutory three-month period, and not for the employee to request it. The case concerned precisely two public holidays that had fallen on a Saturday. Waiting for a request from the employee is therefore not a defensible position.

How is a worked public holiday paid in Luxembourg?

A legal public holiday worked in Luxembourg entitles the employee, where it falls on a day normally worked, to the pay for the hours that would have been worked, the pay for the hours actually worked and a 100 % premium on those hours, giving a total of 300 % according to Guichet.lu. The legislature provides no compensatory day off in that case.

The combination of rules therefore depends on two variables only: the weekday on which the public holiday falls, and whether or not the employee works that day. The table below sets out the four configurations a Luxembourg payroll encounters.

Three details complete the calculation. First, for a monthly-paid employee the normal hourly rate is obtained by dividing the monthly salary by 173, the same divisor used for the leave indemnity. Second, an employee whose contract provides for four hours or less of work on the public holiday concerned is entitled, on top of the remuneration, to half a compensatory day off.

Third, the premium and the base salary are not treated alike in payroll. Guichet.lu states that premiums paid for work performed on legal public holidays are exempt from income tax, and the withholding-tax worked example published by the Administration des contributions directes applies to the public-holiday premium an exemption distinct from the one for overtime. The pay for the hours actually worked that day remains ordinary salary, taxed according to the tax card, hence according to the tax classes and brackets applicable to the employee. The leave indemnity follows the same logic: it is salary, and it is taxed as such.

When is leave acquired, and how long can it be carried over?

The right to take annual leave in Luxembourg arises after three months of uninterrupted work with the same employer, whereas the entitlement itself accrues from the first month, at one twelfth of the annual leave per full month of work. The two mechanisms overlap and must not be confused.

One twelfth of 26 days is 2.17 working days per full month. The Chambre des salariés specifies that, for this count, a fraction of a month exceeding fifteen calendar days counts as a full month. An employee hired on 10 March therefore accrues an entitlement over ten months, but may only start using it from June, unless the employer agrees otherwise or article L. 233-12, paragraph 1 of the Labour Code applies.

Carry-over is where company practice departs most from the text. The principle is that leave is taken within the year. Where the employer could not grant it because of the needs of the business and the justified wishes of other employees, the balance may exceptionally be carried over until 31 March of the following year. For first-year leave that could not be taken in full, carry-over may run until 31 December of the following year, at the employee's request. And in the event of prolonged incapacity for work, untaken leave is carried over for as long as the employee is unable to take it because of illness, beyond 31 March.

Two consequences follow from this regime and deserve a written decision inside the company. First, the Inspection du travail et des mines states that, absent a carry-over request within the deadline, the leave is lost once the applicable carry-over period expires, unless the employer has put a more flexible regime in place; it adds that mentioning carried-over untaken leave on the payslip raises a presumption of unlimited carry-over.

Second, having granted a carry-over to 31 March once must not be read as a company practice. In other words, the carry-over policy binds the employer as it appears in the employer's own payroll documents, and it is better written down than allowed to build up by accident.

Finally, replacing leave with money is strictly prohibited during the contract. A compensatory indemnity is due only at the end of the employment relationship, for days accrued and not taken, without prejudice to the rights attached to the notice period. For each day, the indemnity equals the average gross daily salary of the three months immediately preceding the leave, obtained by dividing the gross monthly salary including salary accessories by 173, then multiplying by the agreed daily working time.

Overtime worked on a habitual basis is added; non-periodic benefits such as gratuities, a thirteenth month or year-end bonuses are excluded; and where pay is subject to pronounced variations, the reference becomes the average of the preceding twelve months.

What the employer must keep: leave book, evidence and year-end

An employer established in Luxembourg must keep a book of statutory leave, ordinary and extraordinary, for all employees under its authority, keep it up to date at all times and produce it to the officers of the Inspection du travail et des mines who ask to inspect it, on the basis of article L. 233-17 of the Labour Code. The leave book therefore joins the documents called for during an inspection, alongside the occupational health and safety obligations, among them the appointment of the designated worker.

The book may take the form of a paper register or a computer file, and the Inspection du travail et des mines provides a downloadable template. Guichet.lu sets out the expected content: the employee's name, the dates and duration of the leave taken, the date of approval and the person responsible for that approval, the type of leave and, where required, the supporting document for special or extraordinary leave. The employee may consult on request the part of the register concerning them, and their signature is not required.

What is at stake with the register is not administrative but evidential. In a dispute, the burden of proof falls on the employer: it is for the employer to show that it granted the statutory leave and, at the end of the contract, that it paid the indemnity for untaken days, and that proof is made by producing the leave book it is obliged to keep. A counter kept in a personal spreadsheet, with no approval date and no identified approver, does not serve that purpose.

The Inspection du travail et des mines goes further and recalls, relying on 2018 case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, that the employer must enable the employee to exercise the right to leave, encouraging them formally if need be to take it and informing them accurately and in good time.

On the year-end side, the balance of leave accrued and not taken at the balance sheet date is a cost of the financial year just ended, not of the year in which the employee will take the days. Allocating it to the right year requires a statement of counters drawn up at the closing date, reconciled with the leave book and valued at each employee's average daily salary. It is the same cut-off reflex that applies to meal vouchers and benefits in kind and, more broadly, to preparing the annual accounts.

In an outsourced payroll file this work sits inside the monthly routine: at the payslip price published in our fee schedule, the leave counter and the register are kept as the year goes, and the year-end statement comes out without reconstruction. We regularly see the opposite: a workforce tracked across three different tools, no enforceable leave book, and public-holiday compensatory days never granted which all surface together at the first contentious departure.

Sources and verification

Written for Financial Services Luxembourg and reviewed before publication by Mickaël LOC, authorised accountant (authorisation 10077274). Sources verified on 9 October 2026: every duration, deadline, premium and date in this article was checked that day against an official Luxembourg source, and no value was taken from memory.

The sources consulted are, for the duration of leave and the notion of a working day, the "Congés annuels payés" page of Guichet.lu for businesses and question-and-answer D8a1 of the Inspection du travail et des mines on the duration of annual leave; for the increase to 26 days and the addition of 9 May, the Inspection du travail et des mines news item of 10 May 2019 and its question-and-answer D9a2 on the list of legal public holidays;

for the 2026 dates, the "Jours fériés légaux" table of the Inspection du travail et des mines, which publishes the dates from 2025 to 2030; for public-holiday pay, the "Travail de jours fériés" and "Connaître la rétribution des jours fériés chômés ou travaillés" pages of Guichet.lu, together with questions-and-answers D9a3, D9a4 and D9a12 of the Inspection du travail et des mines; for liability to grant the compensatory day, the Court of Appeal judgment of 28 May 2020 published in the case-law section of the Inspection du travail et des mines;

for accrual, carry-over and the indemnity, the "Demander un congé légal annuel" pages of Guichet.lu, the "Congé annuel de récréation" sheet of the Chambre des salariés and questions-and-answers D8a8, D8a15, D8a18 and D8b3 of the Inspection du travail et des mines; for the register, the "Livre des congés ordinaires et extraordinaires" page of Guichet.lu, question-and-answer D8a17 citing article L.

233-17 of the Labour Code, question-and-answer D8a14 on the burden of proof and question-and-answer D8a25 on the duty to ensure leave is taken; for the extraordinary leave mentioned in connection with the content of the register, the "Congé extraordinaire pour motif personnel" page of Guichet.lu; for the tax treatment of the premium, the "Travail de jours fériés" page of Guichet.lu and the "Calcul des suppléments de salaires" page of the Administration des contributions directes. All were consulted on 9 October 2026.

Two points could not be verified against an official source and are therefore not asserted in this article. The first is which account of the Luxembourg standard chart of accounts should carry the liability for leave accrued and not taken at the closing date: the research found neither a Luxembourg Business Registers instruction nor a Commission des normes comptables opinion dealing explicitly with that allocation, and the article confines itself to the cut-off principle without citing an account number.

The second is the amount of the penalties attached to failure to keep the leave book: none of the pages consulted quantifies it. A reader wishing to verify these two points independently will find the consolidated text of the Labour Code on Legilux, the standard chart of accounts in its grand-ducal regulation, and may put a written question to the Inspection du travail et des mines, which answers through its information service.

The movable dates for 2027 and later years appear in the same Inspection du travail et des mines table as those for 2026. A sector collective agreement may also grant more days, a longer carry-over or a different indemnity: the applicable agreement always prevails over the statutory floor described here.

This article sets out the state of the law at the date of publication and does not constitute personalised advice: an individual situation, an applicable collective agreement or internal rules may change its consequences. Report an error to contact@financialservices.lu: the correction is dated in the article.