Holiday entitlements for newly graduated students
10 Sep 2024
In September and October, a lot of the students who graduated just before summer will enter the professional world as employees. Their first months will be characterised by a host of new impressions, challenges and hard work, all of which should preferably be counterbalanced with some well-deserved days off. However, do newly graduated students actually enjoy full holiday entitlements when they first start working?
Holiday year versus holiday service year
In Belgium, the legal holiday entitlement of an employee for a given year (the holiday year) is calculated based on the days the employee in question actually worked during the preceding calendar year (the holiday service year). As such, an employee will be entitled to the full amount of legal holidays (20 days per year in a five-day working week) in a calendar year if they worked full-time during the preceding one.
This means that, when a newly graduated student starts their first professional activities in the months following their graduation – e.g. in October of 2024 – they won’t be entitled to any legal holidays in 2024 because they didn’t work in the holiday service year (i.e. 2023) altogether. In the year after their graduation – in our example, 2025 – the employee will not enjoy full holiday entitlements either, due to an incomplete holiday service year (i.e. 2024).
In order for these employees to still enjoy some well-deserved days off work from time to time, two different systems were put in place: youth leave and supplementary leave (also colloquially known as ‘European holiday’).
Year of graduation
As mentioned above,a newly graduated student who starts their first professional activities in the months following graduation won’t be entitled to any days off in that calendar year. In such a situation, the Belgian voluntary system of supplementary leave can be useful. This system is applicable to employees who don’t enjoy full holiday entitlements because they only just started their career (or returned to work after a long period of inactivity) and as such didn’t work a complete holiday service year.
The system requires an initial run-in period of three months’ work before the employee can enjoy any leave. As from the last week of this three-month period, white-collar workers will be entitled to one week off. Specific provisions exist for blue-collar workers, but we’ll only discuss the system of supplementary leave for white-collar workers in this article.
After the run-in period, the employee will accrue supplementary leave incrementally, at a rate of two days/month worked (in a six-day work week, to be prorated in the case of a five-day work week). The supplementary leave accrued during any given calendar year has to be taken up before 31 December of that year and an employee can use the system of supplementary leave until the end of the year following the year in which they (re)started their professional activities.
During the days of supplementary leave, the employee will receive their normal salary. However, these amounts will be subtracted from the employee’s double holiday pay in the next calendar year. As such, the employee in fact pre-finances their own supplementary leave.
In our example above – the newly graduated student who started working on 1 October 2024 in a five-day work week –, the employee’s run-in period will span the months of October, November and December 2024, meaning they’ll be entitled to five days of supplementary leave in the last week of December 2024.
First calendar year following the year of graduation
During the first calendar year following the year of graduation, the employee will already be entitled to a number of legal holidays, if they started working in the year of graduation. Our student who started working on 1 October 2024 will as such be entitled to five legal holidays in 2025.
In addition, an employee will be entitled to youth leave during the first calendar year following the year of graduation if they:
didn’t reach the age of 25 by 31 December of the year of graduation, which is the holiday service year;
completed their studies in the course of the holiday service year; and
after having completed their studies, were a party to an employment agreement for at least one month and worked at least 13 days as an employee during the holiday service year.
An employee who meets the above conditions can be entitled to a maximum of 20 days of youth leave (in a five-day work week) in the year following graduation. However, the number of legal holidays the employee is entitled to – if any – must be subtracted from these 20 days of youth leave and moreover be taken up before any youth leave can be taken up. For the employee’s days off under the system of youth leave, no salary is due by the employer. The employee will instead be entitled to a lump-sum compensation paid by the National Employment Office for these days.
If the recently graduated employee isn’t entitled to youth leave, they can use the system of supplementary leave (see above). As with youth leave, any number of days of legal holiday must be subtracted from the days of supplementary leave they're entitled to and, moreover, must take precedence when actually taking up leave.
The two systems – supplementary leave and youth leave – cannot be combined.
Remark: unpaid leave
If an employee wants to complement the number of days of legal holiday they’re entitled to, there’s also a possibility to take up days of unpaid leave. Contrary to the systems of supplementary leave and youth leave, however, an employee cannot ‘simply’ claim unpaid leave; the employer can freely choose whether or not to accommodate an employee’s request for unpaid leave. In addition, it’s important for an employee to keep in mind that days of unpaid leave can have an impact beyond the mere loss of salary for these days. For example, days of unpaid leave will – again contrary to days of supplementary leave or youth leave – not be taken into account when the employee’s legal holiday entitlement for the next calendar year is determined.
Key takeaway
Although newly graduated students who start their professional career in the year they graduate will only accrue full legal holiday entitlements as from the second calendar year following the year of graduation, various possibilities exist to make sure that these employees can enjoy a minimum of 20 days off per full calendar year.
If you have any further questions on the holiday entitlements of your younger employees, don’t hesitate to reach out; we’d love to hear from you.
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