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

Finland’s annual leave law gives employees a statutory entitlement of 24 or 30 weekdays per year, depending on tenure. But the number that surprises most employers is how those days are counted. Under the Annual Holidays Act (162/2005), Saturdays count as weekdays, which means a single week of vacation consumes six days of entitlement, not five. Combined with a mandatory summer holiday window and two accrual rates, Finnish leave law has more moving parts than most European countries. This guide covers what employers need to know: statutory entitlements, sick leave obligations, work hour tracking rules, parental leave, and the compliance thresholds that arrive as your headcount grows.

TL;DR

• Statutory leave accrues at 2 weekdays/month until the employment has run a year by 31 March, and 2.5 after that, against an April to March credit year. Anything more generous comes from a collective agreement, not the Act
• The Saturday rule (lauantaisääntö) means one week of vacation uses 6 days of entitlement; a team on 30-day entitlement gets exactly 5 weeks off
• The summer holiday (at least 24 weekdays) must be given between 2 May and 30 September
• Employers pay sick leave for the day of illness plus 9 weekdays: 10 weekdays in total; Kela then pays for at most 300 weekdays
• Work hour tracking is mandatory for every employee under the Working Time Act, with no white-collar exemption, and the records must be kept for at least two years after the calendar year ends
• A non-discrimination plan is mandatory from 30 employees

What is the statutory annual leave entitlement in Finland?

You accrue statutory leave at one of two rates, not three, under the Annual Holidays Act (162/2005):

• Employment has run less than a year by 31 March: 2 weekdays per month (24 days per year)
• Employment has run at least a year by 31 March: 2.5 weekdays per month (30 days per year)

There is no statutory third tier. A 3-day or 36-day entitlement for long service exists in some sectors, but it comes from a collective agreement, not from the Act. The occupational safety and health administration is explicit that an agreement may provide longer leave than the Annual Holidays Act. If you are applying a third tier, check which agreement it comes from.

You measure the threshold at the end of the credit year (31 March), not on your employee’s start date. An employee who joins in June and hasn’t been employed a full year by the following 31 March accrues at the lower rate for that whole cycle. Always round a fraction of a day up in the employee’s favour.

You choose the accrual rule by the contractual number of working days, not by whether someone is part-time:

• The 14-day rule is the default: a full credit month is a calendar month with at least 14 days at work or days treated as equivalent.
• The 35-hour rule is the exception, and it applies only where the contract gives so few working days that no month reaches 14, or only some do.

An employee working five short days a week therefore stays on the 14-day rule. One working two or three days a week falls under the 35-hour rule. Where neither threshold is ever met, no annual leave accrues at all, but your employee may take two weekdays of unpaid leave per month and is compensated through holiday compensation.

Holiday pay for weekly and monthly paid staff is normal salary, with no separate supplement, unlike the Swedish semestertillägg. Hourly and performance-paid staff are calculated differently, either by average daily pay times a statutory coefficient or as 9 or 11.5 per cent of the year’s pay. Check which formula your payroll applies to hourly and performance-paid staff before the boundary moves them from the 9 to the 11.5 per cent rate.

How does leave accrue in Finland, and what is the holiday year?

The holiday credit year (lomanmääräytymisvuosi) runs from 1 April to 31 March. Leave accrued in that period is taken in the following holiday season.

Within the holiday year, leave splits into two parts:

• Summer holiday (kesäloma): at least 24 weekdays must be given within the holiday season, 2 May to 30 September. You schedule the dates; the window is fixed by law.
• Winter holiday (talviloma): the remainder must be given before the following holiday season begins.

Both must be given as unbroken periods, unless keeping the work running unavoidably requires the part of the summer holiday exceeding 12 weekdays to be split. You must give at least one month’s notice of the timing, or two weeks if a month is not possible.

The Saturday rule. This is the single most misunderstood element of Finnish leave law. A weekday is any day other than Sunday, a church festival day, Independence Day, Christmas Eve, Midsummer Eve, Easter Saturday and May Day. Saturday is not on that list, so it consumes a day of leave regardless of whether the employee ever works Saturdays. One week of vacation uses 6 days. An employee with 30 days gets exactly 5 weeks. Someone who says they “want two weeks off” will use 12 days from their balance, not 10.

For multi-country teams this creates a silent discrepancy: a shared spreadsheet tracking leave across borders will miscalculate Finnish balances every time.

When illness interrupts leave. If incapacity from childbirth, illness or accident starts during leave that is already running, your employee may request that the days of incapacity beyond six leave days be postponed (Annual Holidays Act 162/2005, section 25). Those first six are self-liability days, and they may not cut into the four-week minimum. Where incapacity starts before the leave does, the whole period is postponed on request, with no self-liability at all. Postponed summer holiday is then given inside the holiday season and postponed winter holiday before the next season begins; where that proves impossible, it moves to the following calendar year.

Saving leave for a later year. Two separate thresholds govern this (section 27):

Saved leave is taken in the calendar year or years the employee chooses. Where you cannot agree the timing, they have to give four months’ notice before it starts.

Next: check whether your leave tracking distinguishes the 18-day agreed threshold from the 24-day unilateral one. Treating them as a single rule gives the wrong answer in both directions.

What do collective agreements add?

Where a collective agreement binds you, the most common additions to leave are extended sick pay periods graded by tenure, clearer rules for calculating flexible working time, and a shorter standard week than the statutory 40 hours. Finland runs a system of generally applicable agreements (työehtosopimukset): you must apply at least the minimum terms of the agreement judged representative for your sector, whether or not you belong to any employer association.

Get the terminology right, because the two words are routinely swapped: the principle here is yleissitovuus. Normaalisitovuus means the opposite: being bound because you are a member of a signatory association.

The tech sector answer is not the obvious one. Whether an agreement is generally binding is confirmed case by case by a board, and the results do not follow intuition:

So a software or consulting company generally has no generally binding agreement, while telecommunications, network construction and contact-centre work do. Because the test is the work the employee actually performs rather than your registered line of business, a company describing itself as a software house while running a contact centre cannot rely on decision 6/2022.

Assuming your company is exempt without checking is a common early-stage compliance mistake. Check your Finlex record against the table above before you assume either way — the full picture, including how to read that record, is in Which collective agreement binds you?

How does sick leave work for employers in Finland?

When an employee falls ill, you pay for the day the illness begins plus the following nine weekdays: ten weekdays in total, with Saturdays counting. Full pay applies where the employment relationship has continued for at least a month; below that the entitlement is 50 per cent of pay for the same window.

After that, Kela pays sickness allowance for at most 300 weekdays.

Key points for employers:

• The obligation begins on the first day of absence. There is no unpaid waiting day as in Sweden
• Kela does not reimburse you for the first ten weekdays. Its waiting period is exactly that long, and no allowance is payable during it. Recovery only becomes relevant for a period your collective agreement extends, and even then only where the terms of the employment relationship provide for the allowance to be paid to you rather than to the employee
• The Act requires only a reliable account of incapacity on request. It specifies no document type, no number of days, and no “doctor from day four”. Self-certification is a policy or collective-agreement choice, not a statutory right
• Many collective agreements extend the employer’s obligation substantially, graded by length of service
• Where the same illness recurs within 30 days, Kela’s waiting period is one day rather than ten. A different illness starts a full waiting period

Note that the Health Insurance Act’s weekday definition is wider than the Annual Holidays Act’s: it excludes only Sundays, church holidays and midweek public holidays. The two counts are not interchangeable. Full detail in Sick pay in Finland.

What are the work hour tracking requirements in Finland?

You must record the hours worked and the compensation paid for them, employee by employee, under the Working Time Act (872/2019). There is no exemption for white-collar or knowledge workers, and none based on salary level.

The records must show one of two alternatives:

• regular working hours, plus additional, overtime, emergency and Sunday work hours and the compensation paid for them, or
• all hours worked, with overtime, emergency and Sunday hours and their increments shown separately

Start and end times are a separate obligation. They belong to the shift roster, which must be drawn up for every workplace and show when regular working time starts and ends and when breaks fall. It has to be issued in writing at least a week before the period begins.

Employees have the right to a written account of their own entries on request. The occupational safety and health authority and the shop steward may demand copies of the records, the averaging plan and the shift roster. Keep the records until the deadline for bringing an action has passed: in practice at least two years beyond the end of the current calendar year.

The statutory standard is 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, though many collective agreements set a shorter week. Flexitime (liukuva työaika) is permitted and common, but the balance limits are statutory (+60 / −20 hours at the end of a four-month monitoring period) and it still requires tracking.

Relying on Slack timestamps or informal self-reporting is not compliance; in a wage dispute or an inspection, the absence of records counts against you. Pull last period’s records and check they show both the hours worked and the shift roster before your next payroll run.

What are the parental leave obligations in Finland?

You give parental leave as part of a 320-weekday pool of parental allowance per child, split evenly between both parents, plus separate pregnancy leave. Kela pays the allowance directly, and you carry no statutory obligation to continue salary during it. Finland overhauled its parental leave system in 2022, replacing the maternity/paternity structure with this unified, equally-allocated model.

The basics:

• Total parental allowance: 320 weekdays per child
• Per parent: 160 weekdays each, where the child has two parents
• Pregnancy allowance: a further 40 weekdays for the pregnant parent, on top of the 320
• Multiple births or simultaneous adoptions: +84 weekdays per additional child
• Transferable: up to 63 weekdays of a parent’s own quota, to the other parent, the child’s other guardian, their own spouse, or the other parent’s spouse

Pregnancy leave begins 30 weekdays before the estimated due date. You and the employee may agree to defer it, but it must begin at the latest 14 weekdays before that date.

Parental leave may be taken in at most four periods, each at least 12 weekdays long, and the days remain available until the child turns two. Kela pays the allowance directly; there is no statutory obligation for the employer to continue paying salary, though many collective agreements provide a top-up.

Annual leave accrues during family leave only up to a cap: 160 days of pregnancy and parental leave per birth or adoption for the parent entitled to pregnancy leave, and correspondingly 160 for the other parent. Beyond that the absence stops generating leave, which is where long absences most often go wrong. Full detail in Parental leave in Finland.

An employee may not be dismissed on the ground that she is pregnant or is using her right to pregnancy or parental leave. Diary the date each employee’s leave passes the 160-day cap so payroll stops crediting annual leave once it does.

What compliance thresholds should Finnish employers know?

State the 30-employee rule precisely: two separate plans are commonly conflated. Where an employer regularly employs at least 30 people, the workplace must have a plan for the measures needed to promote equality. It has no prescribed form but must be verifiable and inspectable, and it may be combined with another workplace plan, including the gender equality plan (tasa-arvosuunnitelma) required separately under the Act on Equality between Women and Men. They are two obligations, not one.

Consultation obligations under the Act on Co-operation within Undertakings (1333/2021) apply from a headcount threshold set in that Act, and cover change negotiations before organisational changes and redundancies. Check whether your headcount brings you in scope before planning any restructuring. The procedure is separate from the grounds for dismissal, which are covered in Terminating employment in Finland.

Employer social insurance contributions and the thresholds that trigger them are set out in The true cost of an employee in Finland.

What are the most common employer mistakes in Finland?

1. Ignoring the Saturday rule: tracking leave in five-day working weeks rather than six-day weekday counts undercounts systematically. An employee who takes 10 days of leave has had less than two weeks off.

2. Applying a statutory third accrual tier: there isn’t one. The Act has two rates, 2 and 2.5 weekdays a month. A 3-day rate is a collective-agreement term. If you apply one, know which agreement it comes from.

3. Choosing the accrual rule by part-time status: the 14-day and 35-hour rules are selected by the contractual number of working days, not by whether someone is part-time. This is the most commonly misapplied part of the Act.

4. Tracking leave on the calendar year: the credit year is 1 April to 31 March. Calendar-year tracking misplaces both the 2/2.5-day boundary and the 9/11.5 per cent holiday pay boundary.

5. Expecting Kela to reimburse the first ten weekdays: it will not. That is its waiting period. Reimbursement only concerns a collective-agreement extension, and only where the employment terms route the allowance to you.

6. Assuming the tech CBA applies, or that none does: both errors are common. The IT service sector agreement is not generally binding; the ICT sector agreements are. The test is the work performed, not the registered line of business.

7. Recording only overtime: the Act requires hours worked and compensation paid, employee by employee, and the shift roster is a separate document again.

Run through this list against your current leave policy, payroll setup and time-tracking tool before your next payroll close.

Taito.ai sets up and keeps the annual leave accrual — the Saturday-rule day count, the 2 and 2.5-day tiers, and the credit-year boundary — maintained automatically for every employee.

Sources

• Annual Holidays Act 162/2005 (Finlex)
• Working Time Act 872/2019 (Finlex)
• Employment Contracts Act 55/2001 (Finlex)
• Health Insurance Act 1224/2004 (Finlex)
• Act on Co-operation within Undertakings 1333/2021 (Finlex)
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration — number of holiday days
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration — promoting equality
• Kela — sickness allowance

Finlex publishes these acts in Finnish and Swedish only. There is no citable official English translation, so every rule here is paraphrased rather than quoted. Where the exact wording matters, follow the link and read the Finnish or Swedish text.

Disclaimer

Taito.ai does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice. This article is general information about the law as it stood on the date above, not advice on your situation, and it is not a substitute for it. Rates and thresholds change. Check with a qualified adviser before acting on anything here.