Employee time off and attendance policy in Denmark: a guide for employers

Danish employees are entitled to 25 paid vacation days per year under the Holiday Act (Ferieloven), but the practical standard is 30 days. Most Danish employers grant five additional days — feriefridage — through collective agreements or employment contracts, and these carry their own separate rules. On top of that, a significant reform in 2020 changed the entire structure of how leave is earned and taken, moving from a system where employees banked leave in one year and used it in the next, to one where leave is earned and taken simultaneously. Companies that did not fully update their leave tracking at the time of the reform may still be running incorrect balances. This guide covers everything employers need to know: statutory entitlements, the feriefridage system, sick leave, the new work hour tracking rules introduced in July 2024, parental leave, and the most common employer mistakes.

TL;DR

• Statutory entitlement is 25 paid days per year; in practice 30 days (6 weeks) is the standard through feriefridage
• The 2020 reform introduced simultaneous holidays — leave is earned and taken in the same period; the old annual banking system no longer applies
• Feriefridage (5 extra days) are not statutory; they operate under different rules to the main 25-day entitlement and must be tracked separately
• Denmark has the longest employer sick pay obligation in the Nordics: 30 calendar days at full salary
• Mandatory work hour tracking came into force 1 July 2024; Denmark allows a simplified deviations-only recording method
• No statutory minimum wage; pay is set by collective agreements or individual contracts

What is the statutory annual leave entitlement in Denmark?

The Ferieloven gives every employee in Denmark a minimum of 25 paid vacation days per year, accruing at 2.08 days per month. This is the statutory floor.

In practice, most Danish employers provide 30 days (6 weeks) of paid leave by adding 5 feriefridage — a widespread contractual benefit covered in more detail below.

Public holidays (11 per year) are separate from the 25 statutory days and are not deducted from the vacation balance. Salaried employees covered by the Salaried Employees Act (Funktionærloven) receive full salary on public holidays as a baseline right.

Vacation pay. Danish employees receive their normal salary during vacation, plus a holiday allowance (feriepenge) calculated as a percentage of earnings for the period worked. The mechanics differ depending on whether the employee is salaried or hourly, and whether they are covered by a CBA. The key principle is that vacation is not simply a period of unpaid absence offset by accrued savings — it carries its own pay entitlement.

What changed with Denmark’s 2020 holiday reform?

Denmark’s holiday system was significantly reformed in 2020, effective from September 1, 2020.

The old system. Employees earned vacation days during one calendar year (January to December) and were entitled to take them in the following holiday year (May 1 to April 30). A new hire joining in January would work the entire year before being able to take leave earned in that period.

The new system. Leave is now earned and taken simultaneously. As employees accrue days each month, they can take them immediately. There is no separate earnings period and holiday period — the two run in parallel.

This reform simplified the system in principle but created a transition problem. Companies that tracked leave under the old sequential model — earning in one period, spending in another — needed to migrate their systems. The concern: companies that did not fully complete that migration may have employees with leave balances calculated under the old logic, leading to either overpayment or entitlement that cannot legally be withheld.

If your company was operating in Denmark before September 2020 and has not audited your leave tracking since, this is worth checking.

What are feriefridage, and how do they work?

Feriefridage are 5 additional paid leave days granted by most Danish employers, bringing the effective total to 30 days (6 weeks) per year. They are not mandated by the Ferieloven — they are a contractual benefit established through collective agreements or individual employment contracts.

The critical distinction for employers: feriefridage operate under different rules to the statutory 25 days.

• Feriefridage are typically granted as a fixed number of days per year, not accrued proportionally across months
• They may not carry over at year end (the specific rules depend on the agreement or contract)
• The holiday allowance (feriepenge) that applies to the statutory 25 days does not automatically apply to feriefridage
• Employees with feriefridage in their contract who leave mid-year may have different entitlements than under statutory leave

Running feriefridage in the same bucket as statutory leave days — treating all 30 days identically — is a common and consequential error. The two entitlements need to be tracked separately with their own rules applied.

How does sick leave work for employers in Denmark?

Denmark has the longest employer sick pay obligation of any Nordic country.

Employer period: 30 calendar days. When an employee is absent due to illness, the employer pays full salary for the first 30 calendar days. This is calculated from the first day of absence and includes weekends.

For the employer sick pay obligation to apply, the employee must have been employed for at least 8 weeks and worked a minimum of 74 hours during that period. Employees who have not met this threshold do not have an employer sick pay entitlement and should be directed to the municipality from the start.

Municipality from day 31. After 30 days, the employee’s case is handed to their municipality (kommunen), which evaluates eligibility and takes over payment of sygedagpenge (sickness benefit). The maximum benefit is approximately 4,650 DKK per week in 2026.

To be eligible for municipality sick pay, the employee must have worked at least 240 hours within the 6 completed calendar months prior to the first day of absence.

Employer reporting obligation. Employers must report absences exceeding 30 days to the municipality within 5 weeks via NemRefusion on Virk.dk. Missing this deadline does not extinguish the employee’s right to benefits, but it creates an administrative liability for the employer.

What are the work hour tracking requirements in Denmark?

Denmark introduced mandatory work hour tracking on 1 July 2024, implementing the requirements of the EU Working Time Directive and the 2019 European Court of Justice ruling.

All employers, regardless of size or sector, must now maintain an objective, reliable, and accessible system for recording daily working hours for all employees.

Denmark’s simplified recording option. Unlike Finland and Norway, which require full daily start and end time recording, Danish law allows a lighter approach: employers can record only deviations from a defined normal working schedule. If an employee is expected to work 37.5 hours per week and does exactly that, no entry is required. Only departures from the norm — overtime, early finish, absence — need to be logged.

This approach is permitted provided the employer has a defined normal schedule in writing. Employers without a documented standard working pattern cannot use the deviations method and must record all hours.

Key requirements:

• Records must be accessible to employees and to Danish authorities upon request
• Retention period: 5 years
• Individual agreements permitting more than 48 hours per week must be provided to authorities on request
• A limited exemption exists for “self-organisers” — employees whose hours are genuinely not measurable or predetermined, typically senior executives with full autonomy over their own time

Employers who were relying on flexible informal arrangements without any formal tracking system are now non-compliant and should act to implement a solution.

What are the parental leave obligations in Denmark?

Denmark reformed its parental leave system in 2022, applying to children born from August 2, 2022 onward.

Total entitlement: 48 weeks of paid parental leave, structured as follows:

• 2 weeks non-transferable per parent (earmarked, cannot be given to the other parent)
• 9 weeks non-transferable per parent (earmarked)
• 26 weeks freely shareable between the two parents

For single parents, the total entitlement is 46 weeks. Since January 2024, the non-earmarked 26 weeks can also be transferred to a social parent (spouse, known donor, or donor’s spouse/cohabitant) in same-sex and LGBT+ families.

The parental benefit is paid by the employee’s municipality or employer depending on the sector, at a capped weekly rate. Many collective agreements require employers to top up the benefit to full salary during some or all of the leave period — this is particularly common in public sector and larger private sector agreements.

Employer obligations during parental leave:

• The employee’s position must be held open
• Return-to-work rights are protected by law
• Employees must give reasonable notice of their leave dates; specific notice periods may be set by CBA or employment contract

What compliance thresholds should Danish employers know?

Unlike Finland’s Co-operation Act or Sweden’s MBL, Denmark does not have a single headcount-triggered consultation law that applies to all private sector employers. The main obligations are threshold-agnostic:

The Funktionærloven (Salaried Employees Act) is worth understanding for any company hiring white-collar workers in Denmark. It sets baseline rights around notice periods, sick pay, and working conditions for salaried employees. It applies automatically to employees who work more than 15 hours per week in a salaried capacity.

What are the most common employer mistakes in Denmark?

1. Tracking feriefridage and statutory leave as a single pool. The 30 days many employers provide are not 30 identical days. The statutory 25 days and the feriefridage carry different rules on pay calculation and carryover. Merging them into one bucket applies the wrong rules to some of them.

2. Not completing the 2020 reform migration. Companies operating before September 2020 that did not fully audit their leave system may have employees on balances calculated under the old sequential model. This results in either overstated entitlement or liability for accrued days that should have been taken.

3. Underestimating the 30-day employer sick pay obligation. At 30 calendar days, Denmark’s employer period is 14 days longer than Norway’s and significantly longer than Finland’s or Sweden’s. For companies with limited reserves, this needs to be budgeted for.

4. Missing the NemRefusion reporting deadline. Employers who do not report absences exceeding 30 days within 5 weeks create an administrative compliance gap, even if the employee’s rights are not directly affected.

5. No documented normal working schedule. Employers who want to use Denmark’s simplified deviations-only tracking approach must have a defined and documented standard working pattern. Without it, full daily logging is required and using the lighter method is non-compliant.

6. Assuming there is a statutory minimum wage. Denmark has no statutory minimum wage. Employers new to the market who assume there is a legal floor to reference may underpay or struggle to benchmark salaries without understanding the CBA landscape.

Denmark’s two-tier leave system needs two sets of rules, not one spreadsheet.

Taito.ai tracks feriefridage separately from statutory leave, applies the simultaneous holiday model, and keeps compliant work hour records automatically. Set up in under a day.

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