Chile annual leave entitlement

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What the law actually says

After one year of service an employee is entitled to 15 working days of paid annual leave (feriado anual), counted Monday to Friday because Saturdays are treated as non-working days for this purpose. The leave should be granted preferably in spring or summer and taken as a continuous period, though anything beyond 10 working days may be split by agreement. Employees with more than ten years of service, for one or more employers, gain one extra day for every three further years with the current employer (feriado progresivo), and employees in the far northern and southern regions get 20 days.

What happens to unused leave in Chile

Chilean law lets an employee and employer agree to accumulate leave, but only up to two consecutive periods; the employer must grant at least the first of them before the third accrues. Leave is not exchangeable for money during employment. When the contract ends, Article 73 requires payment for any full periods not taken and for the proportional leave of the current year.

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 Chile

• Write the entitlement into every contract. At least 15 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 Chile

• Check your contract gives at least 15 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 15-day minimum

Compare all 46 countries →

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 Chile 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 Chile 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.

Source

Primary source: Código del Trabajo, Arts. 67–73. Statutory minimums change, and collective agreements frequently exceed them — confirm against the current text before acting. See our methodology.