Leave by country / Austria
Austria annual leave entitlement
How much paid leave people in Austria get, what happens to unused days, and what you owe when someone leaves — in plain English, whether you run a team there or work on one.
Austria guarantees a statutory minimum of 25 paid annual leave days per year (5 weeks on a five-day week) under Urlaubsgesetz. Unused statutory leave must be paid out when employment ends, and it cannot be exchanged for cash while the employee is still employed.
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What the law actually says
Employees are entitled to 30 Werktage of paid leave, which is 25 working days on a five-day week. After 25 years of service with the same employer the entitlement rises to 36 Werktage, or 30 working days.
Worth knowing: Entitlement accrues pro rata during the first six months of the first year of employment.
What happens to unused leave in Austria
Statutory leave in Austria is expected to be taken in the year it accrues, with limited carryover into the following period. The important protection is that leave an employee was genuinely prevented from taking — through sickness or parental leave, for example — is protected by settled case law and does not simply disappear.
When employment ends, the untaken balance must be paid. This is the rule across the European Union and Australia, and it is the sharpest contrast with the United States, where whether unused time is paid out depends entirely on which state the employee works in.
If you run a team in Austria
- Write the entitlement into every contract. At least 25 days; more is fine, less is void. Collective agreements may add to it.
- Track accrual and carryover to the day, with a record of every approval. When someone leaves, the untaken balance is money you owe, and you will need to show how you got to the number.
- Budget for the payout. Every unused day on the books is a liability at that person's current pay rate — it does not disappear at year end.
If you work in Austria
- Check your contract gives at least 25 days. Anything less is unenforceable.
- Keep your own record of approved leave. Payroll systems get changed; your notes don't.
- When you leave, untaken statutory leave must be paid out. It cannot be forfeited.
Countries with the same 25-day minimum
Calculating an employee's balance
Entitlement is the starting point; the working number is what an individual has actually accrued at a given date. Our accrual calculator converts an annual entitlement into a per-pay-period figure and a current balance.
Tracking Austria leave correctly
Because untaken leave is money the employer owes, the balance has to be provable. Spreadsheets fail at exactly the moment they matter — when someone disputes what they were owed on their last day and nobody can reconstruct the record.
For a single-country team, Leavo handles Austria accrual rules, carryover and approvals with a full audit trail. If you employ people in more than one country, statutory entitlements, carryover rules and payout obligations differ in every one — that is the case for a platform like Deel that handles multi-country employment rather than leave alone. We compare the options in our leave management software guide.
Austria annual leave: common questions
How many paid annual leave days are employees entitled to in Austria?
25 working days is the statutory minimum in Austria, equivalent to 5 weeks on a five-day working week, under Urlaubsgesetz. Employers and collective agreements may grant more, never less.
Must unused annual leave be paid out when employment ends in Austria?
Yes. Payment in lieu of untaken statutory leave is required when the employment relationship ends in Austria. During employment, statutory leave must be taken as time off and cannot be exchanged for cash.
Can an employer in Austria refuse a leave request?
An employer can usually influence when leave is taken for operational reasons, but cannot deny the entitlement itself. The right to the minimum number of days is statutory and cannot be contracted away.
Do public holidays count towards the 25-day entitlement in Austria?
No. Public holidays are separate from the 25-day statutory annual leave entitlement in Austria.
Source
Primary source: Urlaubsgesetz. Statutory minimums change, and collective agreements frequently exceed them — confirm against the current text before acting. See our methodology.