Annual Leave Entitlement by Country

How many paid days off the law actually guarantees — in 52 countries, each sourced to the statute that creates the right.

Reviewed 16 September 2026 · 52 countries

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Also by country: sick leave and sick pay · maternity, paternity and parental leave.

Every country compared

Figures are statutory minimums in working days on a five-day week. Collective agreements and individual contracts frequently grant more. Average across the 52 countries listed: 17.8 days.

The three rules that apply almost everywhere

1. The minimum cannot be contracted away. An employment contract or collective agreement may improve on the statutory floor, never reduce it.
2. Leave cannot be swapped for cash while employed. The entitlement exists so people actually rest. Payment in lieu is permitted only at the end of employment.
3. The untaken balance is paid out when employment ends. This is universal across the EU and Australia and the rule in most of the world — Japan is the notable exception, and it is precisely where the United States diverges.

Countries at the EU floor of 20 days

Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland sit exactly at the Working Time Directive minimum. In several of these, collective agreements push the practical market norm well above the legal floor — German contracts commonly offer 25 to 30 days despite a 20-day statutory minimum.

The United States is the outlier

No federal law requires a single paid day off. Whether unused time must be paid at separation depends on the state: 12 treat accrued PTO as earned wages that must be paid, while the rest leave it to the employer's written policy. We cover all 51 US jurisdictions separately in the US PTO payout laws guide.

If you employ people in more than one country

This table is the reason multi-country payroll is hard. An employee in Luxembourg accrues 26 days, one in the Netherlands accrues 20 that expire six months after the accrual year, one in Australia accrues 20 that never expire, and one in Texas may accrue nothing at all. A single leave policy cannot express all of that correctly.

For a single-country team, Leavo handles accrual and carryover rules with a proper audit trail. Once you employ across borders, the problem is no longer leave tracking but employment compliance, which is what a platform like Deel exists for. Our software comparison covers where each one fits.

How we built this

Each country is summarised from the statute or national framework named in its row, linked on the country page. Figures are statutory minimums, converted to working days on a five-day week so they are genuinely comparable — several countries express entitlement in six-day Werktage or in calendar days, which makes raw headline numbers misleading. See our methodology, download the figures from our open data page (CC BY 4.0), or check a term in the glossary. The policy questions — carryover, payout, accrual, running one policy across borders — are covered in our guides.