Why holiday and sick leave are separate entitlements
Sick leave and holiday do two different things in Dutch employment law, and the fact that they can run at the same time confuses almost everyone involved. Sick leave is a state: the employee is unfit for work, the employer owes wages under article 7:629 BW, and both sides carry reintegration duties. Holiday is an entitlement the employee accrues and then uses, governed by a separate section of Book 7 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek.Because they are separate, being ill does not switch the holiday entitlement off. The Burgerlijk Wetboek was amended with effect from 1 January 2012 so that an employee who is unfit for work accrues statutory holiday over the entire period of absence, exactly as a working colleague does. The statutory minimum is four times the agreed weekly working hours per year, and an employee absent for two years therefore builds up two full years of it.The point of allowing a sick employee to take that holiday is not administrative tidiness. Time genuinely free of work and reintegration obligations can support recovery, particularly in mental health absence, and Dutch practice recognises that. What the law will not allow is a break that sets recovery back or that quietly parks a reintegration process nobody wants to run.Who does what
Three parties are involved, and their roles are more clearly divided than most workplace conversations suggest.- The employee makes the request, preferably in writing with the dates, and cooperates with the assessment. Consent matters here: under article 7:637 BW holiday days may not simply be written off against an absence without the employee agreeing to it.
- The employer takes the decision. Article 7:638 BW requires the employer to fix the holiday in line with the employee’s wishes unless there are gewichtige redenen (weighty reasons) against it.
- The bedrijfsarts (company doctor) advises on one question only: whether the proposed absence would obstruct recovery or reintegration. The doctor does not approve destinations, itineraries or budgets, and does not decide the request.
The company doctor advises; the employer decides. An employer who refuses a holiday request cannot hide behind the bedrijfsarts, and an employee who has positive medical advice does not yet have an approved holiday.That division matters in a dispute. If the medical advice is positive and the employer still refuses, the refusal has to stand on its own reasons, and those reasons have to be weighty ones under article 7:638 BW.
Quick guide to vacation during sick leave
| Aspect | Rule |
|---|---|
| Accrual | Statutory holiday continues to accrue in full throughout the absence. |
| Condition | The holiday must not obstruct recovery or the agreed reintegration activities. |
| Decision | The employer decides under article 7:638 BW and may refuse only for weighty reasons. |
| Medical input | The bedrijfsarts gives advice on the medical question; that advice is not binding. |
| Consent | Days may be deducted only with the employee’s agreement, under article 7:637 BW. |
| Pay | Article 7:639 BW preserves the wage during holiday, so approved days are paid in full rather than at the sick-pay rate. |
How the approval process works
Start with a written request naming the dates. That is not a formality: article 7:638 BW attaches a consequence to it. If the employee sets out the requested period in writing and the employer does not put forward weighty reasons in writing within two weeks, the holiday is fixed as requested. An employer who lets the deadline pass has effectively granted the leave.Most employers will forward the request to the arbodienst so that the bedrijfsarts can assess it. The doctor looks at the nature of the complaints, the treatment in progress and the stage of reintegration, and answers whether the absence would obstruct recovery. Practical questions the doctor may raise are whether appointments fall in the requested period, whether travel is medically inadvisable, and whether the employee is at a point where rest helps rather than delays.What the doctor may not do is disclose diagnoses to the employer. The advice reaching the employer is limited to functional information: whether the employee can be absent, and any conditions attached. That restriction follows from medical confidentiality and from the GDPR, and employers who ask for more are asking for something they cannot lawfully receive.When an employer may refuse
Once the medical advice is positive, refusal becomes difficult. The threshold in article 7:638 BW is gewichtige redenen, and the standard is whether granting the leave would cause a serious disruption to the business that cannot reasonably be resolved. Ordinary staffing pressure, the cost of cover or general inconvenience do not meet it, and neither does a wish to keep holiday days on the books.Refusal is more defensible where the requested period collides with the reintegration process itself: a scheduled occupational health appointment, an agreed trial period in adapted work, or an evaluation moment under the Wet verbetering poortwachter. Even then the answer is usually to move the dates, not to refuse outright.Deduction and the consent requirement
If the holiday goes ahead, the days come off the holiday balance and the employee is on holiday, not on sick leave, for that period. Deduction requires the employee’s agreement. Article 7:637 BW prevents an employer from designating days of incapacity as holiday unilaterally; an employer that books days off without agreement will have to credit them back.Written agreements can go a little further, but only within limits, and only in relation to the days above the statutory minimum. The statutory four weeks are protected precisely because they exist to give real rest, and European case law on the Working Time Directive is the reason Dutch law guards them so firmly. Our overview of statutory leave and holiday entitlement in the Netherlands explains how the statutory and above-statutory layers differ.What you are paid for holiday taken while sick
Approved holiday days during sickness are paid at the normal wage under article 7:639 BW. If they appear on the payslip at the sick-pay rate, the days have probably been registered as sick days rather than as holiday.There is a mirror image to this. Because holiday is paid at the higher rate and comes out of a balance the employee owns, an employer cannot use holiday as a way of reducing the cost of an absence, and an employee cannot use it to top up sick pay without actually giving up the days.
Reintegration duties do not disappear
The framework around a long absence is the Wet verbetering poortwachter, and it runs on a timetable that a holiday has to fit around rather than interrupt. The employee is reported to the arbodienst in the first week. The bedrijfsarts draws up a problem analysis by around week six. Employer and employee then agree a plan of action, the Plan van Aanpak, within roughly two weeks of that analysis, and evaluate it at least every six weeks. A first-year evaluation follows at around week fifty-two, and the WIA application is made in the second year.Missing those steps has a concrete price. If UWV concludes at the end of the two years that the employer made insufficient reintegration efforts, it can impose a wage sanction extending the obligation to continue paying wages by up to a further year. An employee who obstructs reintegration risks suspension of wage payment under article 7:629 BW. Neither side can afford to treat the process as paperwork, and both are set out further in our articles on what a reintegration plan is and why it matters and on the employee’s obligations after illness and when wage sanctions apply.During the days formally registered as holiday, the employee is off duty. There is no obligation to attend reintegration appointments, answer work calls or respond to email, which is the whole reason for registering the days as holiday rather than simply agreeing to a trip. That is also why the dates need to be recorded accurately: an informal arrangement to travel while remaining on sick leave leaves the reintegration obligations fully in place.Outside those days the ordinary duties continue. The employee must remain reachable at the agreed address, provide the information the employer reasonably needs, and cooperate with reasonable reintegration proposals. Our guide on employee obligations during illness sets out the detail, and Dutch employee sickness rights covers the other side of the relationship.Falling ill before or during a booked holiday
Report the illness on day one, through the normal channel, and obtain a local medical certificate. Those two steps are what convert holiday days back into sick days under article 7:638 lid 8 BW.The same rule works in the other direction. An employee who is already on sick leave and then recovers during an approved holiday should report the recovery, because the reintegration process resumes at that point.
How sick leave interacts with other kinds of leave
Annual holiday is not the only form of leave in Dutch law, and the others behave differently when someone is already unfit for work. The organising principle is that sickness is a status rather than a form of leave: it does not have to be requested, and it generally takes precedence.Short-term care leave and long-term care leave under the Wet arbeid en zorg are for caring for a sick child, partner or parent. An employee who is personally unfit for work cannot meaningfully take them, because the leave presupposes that the employee would otherwise be working. Calamity and short absence leave works the same way.Special leave for events such as a funeral or a move usually rests on the collective agreement rather than the statute, and there too the sickness status normally takes priority; the employee is already released from work and paid under article 7:629 BW.Pregnancy and maternity leave has its own protection. Illness in pregnancy before the maternity leave starts is sickness, and the fixed maternity leave period is not consumed by it. Where the illness is pregnancy-related, the benefit runs through UWV rather than through the employer’s obligation to continue paying wages, which is why correct reporting matters. Parental leave is a separate entitlement again and is not lost by an intervening period of sickness.Interaction between sick leave and other leave types
| Leave type | Interaction with sick leave | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Annual holiday (vakantiedagen) | Can be taken with the employer’s approval; days are deducted with the employee’s consent. | Request in writing; employer consults the bedrijfsarts and decides within two weeks. |
| Care leave (zorgverlof) | Not available while the employee is personally unfit for work. | Discuss the care situation with the employer and the bedrijfsarts instead. |
| Special leave (bijzonder verlof) | Sickness normally takes precedence; the entitlement rests on the CAO. | Check the collective agreement; no separate registration is usually needed. |
| Pregnancy and maternity leave | Illness before the leave begins is sickness and does not shorten the maternity leave. | Report pregnancy-related illness as such; the benefit runs through UWV. |
Expiry of holiday days built up during a long absence
Long absences produce large holiday balances, and the question of when those days lapse is worth more money than most of the rest of this subject. Two regimes run alongside each other.Statutory days, the four weeks that article 7:634 BW guarantees, expire six months after the end of the calendar year in which they were accrued. That short period exists to encourage people to actually take their rest. Article 7:640a BW carries an important exception: the six-month period does not apply where the employee was reasonably unable to take the holiday. An employee who was too ill to take any leave at all falls within that exception, and the days then remain available for the ordinary limitation period of five years under article 7:642 BW.Above-statutory days are not subject to the six-month rule at all; the five-year period applies to them from the outset. Collective agreements may improve on these rules but cannot make them worse for the employee where the statutory minimum is concerned.The exception is narrower than employees often assume. An employee who is partially fit, or fit enough to take holiday even though not fit to work, is not reasonably unable to take leave, and the six-month clock keeps running. This is precisely why a sick employee is generally well advised to take holiday rather than let it accumulate, and why an employer who lets a balance build unchecked can end up paying it out on termination.Employers carry an information duty here. European case law on the Working Time Directive requires the employer to tell employees in good time which days are about to expire; days the employee was never warned about do not simply disappear.
Three situations that come up repeatedly
The rules read abstractly, so it helps to see how they land in the three patterns that account for most requests.The first is the restorative break during long-term absence, typically in burnout or another mental health absence. Here the medical advice is often actively positive: a genuine period without work contact can help. The sequence is a written request, advice from the bedrijfsarts, a decision from the employer within two weeks, and registration of the days as holiday so that reintegration duties are suspended and the wage is paid in full for that period.The second is illness during a holiday that was booked and approved long before. The employee reports sick on the first day through the normal channel, obtains a local medical certificate, and hands it in on return. Those days revert to sick days under article 7:638 lid 8 BW and go back into the balance. Nothing about being abroad changes the reporting obligation.The third is a short trip during a physical recovery, for example after surgery. The distance is small and the stakes look low, which is exactly why people skip the formalities. They should not. Registering the days as holiday is what protects the employee from an argument later that the trip showed a capacity to work, and it is what entitles them to full pay for those days. A short medical check with the bedrijfsarts also protects the employee if the recovery goes badly.A fourth pattern deserves a mention because it goes wrong so often: the employee who is partially fit and working reduced hours. Holiday taken in that situation is deducted in proportion to the contractual hours, not to the hours actually being worked, because the entitlement accrues on the contract. Employers who deduct only the hours the employee would have worked that week are short-changing themselves, and employers who deduct a full day for a half-day of adapted work are short-changing the employee.Across all four the pattern is the same: a written request, medical advice on the medical question, a decision by the employer, and accurate registration. Where any of the four is missing, the disputes follow.Disputes: the expert opinion and the route to court
When a request is refused, when the bedrijfsarts and the employee disagree about fitness, or when reintegration stalls, the first step is documentation. Put the request, the reasons given and the medical advice in writing, and keep the correspondence. Most of these disputes are won or lost on what can be shown afterwards.The next step is the deskundigenoordeel, the expert opinion from UWV. Either party can apply for one, at a fee that differs for employers and employees, and UWV will give an independent view on a defined question: whether the employee is fit for their own work or for other suitable work, whether the employer’s reintegration efforts are sufficient, whether the employee’s efforts are sufficient, or whether particular work is suitable.The opinion is not binding, but it carries real weight in practice and in court. It is also close to indispensable for an employee who wants to litigate: article 7:629a BW provides that a claim for continued payment of wages during sickness is inadmissible unless it is accompanied by an expert statement of this kind, unless obtaining one cannot reasonably be required.An expert opinion from UWV is the standard way out of a deadlock, and under article 7:629a BW it is normally a precondition for bringing a wage claim during sickness before the kantonrechter.If the dispute is about the holiday itself rather than about fitness, the route is different. A refusal of leave under article 7:638 BW is a civil dispute between employer and employee and belongs before the kantonrechter, who can be asked in interim relief proceedings to fix the holiday as requested. Because the two-week rule in article 7:638 BW works in the employee’s favour, the correspondence trail again decides the case.Where the underlying conflict is not really medical at all, a situatieve arbeidsongeschiktheid or a workplace conflict presented as illness, neither the bedrijfsarts nor a holiday request will resolve it. Those cases need to be addressed as what they are, usually through mediation or through negotiation about the end of the employment relationship.
Travelling abroad while receiving a benefit from UWV
Not every sick employee is paid by an employer. Employees whose contract has ended during the absence, temporary agency workers in certain constructions, and people who fall ill shortly after a contract ends may receive a Ziektewet benefit directly from UWV. The rules on travel are stricter in that situation, because the paying body is the benefits agency rather than the employer.Someone receiving a Ziektewet benefit must report an intended stay abroad to UWV in advance and obtain agreement before leaving. UWV assesses whether the absence affects recovery and whether it can still carry out its supervision and its own reintegration obligations. Travelling without reporting can lead to suspension or reduction of the benefit, and to recovery of amounts already paid.The same logic applies to a WIA benefit later in the process. The reporting duty is part of the general obligation to give the benefits agency the information it needs, and it is separate from anything agreed with a former employer. Where both an employer and UWV are involved, both have to be informed.For employees who remain employed, there is no comparable statutory duty to report a trip to a public body, but there is a contractual one. The employer needs to know where the employee is and how to reach them, and control rules in the employment contract or the verzuimreglement can lawfully require an address abroad to be provided in advance.Holiday balances when the employment ends
Long absences frequently end in termination, either after the two-year period of wage payment or by mutual consent, and the accumulated holiday balance then has to be settled. Article 7:641 BW gives the employee a claim to payment for holiday days not taken at the end of the employment, calculated at the wage applicable at that moment.That is why balances built up over two years of absence matter financially. Statutory days that survived the six-month rule because the employee was reasonably unable to take them, plus above-statutory days within the five-year period, all fall to be paid out. Employers who never encouraged the employee to take holiday during the absence usually end up paying the full amount.An employee who takes holiday during the absence therefore converts days into paid rest at the time; an employee who does not converts them into a payment at the end. Neither is wrong, but the choice should be a conscious one, and for a person in the middle of a burnout the rest is usually worth more than the payment.The transition payment is a separate entitlement and is not affected by the holiday balance. It is owed on termination at the employer’s initiative, including after two years of illness, and an employer that ends a long-term absence through the UWV route can apply to UWV for compensation of that payment. Our employment law guides set out how those entitlements fit together.Frequently asked questions about leave during sickness
The questions below are the ones we are asked most often by employees and employers dealing with a holiday request during an ongoing absence.Can my employer refuse my holiday if the company doctor approves it?
It’s very difficult for an employer to justify this. Once the company doctor (bedrijfsarts) gives a positive medical opinion, confirming the holiday won’t get in the way of your recovery, an employer needs a truly compelling business reason (gewichtige redenen) to say no.
What qualifies as compelling? Think of something that would cause serious disruption, not just general busyness or minor staffing issues. If an employer denies a medically approved request without such a powerful reason, you have solid grounds to challenge their decision, perhaps by requesting an expert opinion from the UWV.
Do I have to be available for work calls while on holiday?
Absolutely not. When you’re on officially approved and registered vacation days, you are completely off the hook from all work and reintegration duties. This is the core difference between taking a formal holiday versus simply getting permission to travel while you remain on sick leave.
It’s vital to make sure the dates are formally logged as vacation. Doing so protects your time, meaning you have no obligation to answer calls, check emails, or join in on any reintegration meetings.
During approved vacation days, your only responsibility is to rest and recover. Your work obligations are paused, allowing for a genuine break, which is often the primary purpose of the time off in the first place.
What happens to my vacation days during long-term sick leave?
You continue to build up vacation days as you normally would throughout your period of sick leave, just as if you were working. The rules around when these days expire, however, change to give you more protection.
Typically, statutory vacation days (the legal minimum) expire six months into the year after you earned them. But if you were genuinely unable to take them because of sickness, this expiration period is extended to five years. It’s always a good idea to chat with your employer and agree on a plan for using these accrued days to avoid any mix-ups down the line.
How does a vacation abroad affect my sickness benefits?
If you’re receiving sickness benefits directly from the UWV (Ziektewetuitkering), you have an extra reporting step to take. You must always inform the UWV of any plans to travel abroad and get their explicit permission before you leave the country.
This is a separate process from getting the green light from your employer and the company doctor. The UWV needs to assess whether the travel impacts your recovery or their ability to keep an eye on your situation. Forgetting to report international travel can lead to your benefits being suspended, reduced, or even stopped altogether.
