Norway employment compliance: a guide for employers

You have hired someone in Norway, and four bodies of rule now decide what you owe them. Two of them use words that look familiar and mean something else: virkedag is not a working day, and the 6G cap is not what almost everyone assumes.

This page is the map. Each section gives you the rule, the numbers you need at month-end, and a link to the full treatment.

Start where you are. Booking the summer, or running the June payroll? Leave and holiday pay: start with the unit, because it is where the day count goes wrong. Someone off sick? Who pays, and the sixteen-day gap that decides whether liability restarts. Rostering, or wondering whether a salaried role is exempt from hour records? Working time. It is not. A union in touch, or operating in one of the ten minimum-wage sectors? What actually binds you. Want the year on one page? The recurring deadlines.

How much holiday pay do Norwegian employees get, and when?

Twenty-five virkedager of leave at 10.2 per cent, and both of those numbers mean something different from what they look like.

A virkedag is any day that is not a Sunday or a statutory public holiday, so Saturday counts. Twenty-five virkedager is four weeks and one day in ordinary Monday-to-Friday terms, not five weeks (ferieloven s. 5). Five weeks in everyday speech means 30 virkedager, and that fifth week is what the 12 per cent rate pays for.

Two things carry most of the money.

The 6G cap applies to one line only. Section 10 no. 3 withholds the holiday pay granted by its own first paragraph (the 2.3-point supplement) for the part of the feriepengegrunnlag above 6G. The base rate is not mentioned. So the base applies uncapped to the whole grunnlag, and only the supplement is limited. Applying 12.5 per cent to everything overpays; capping the whole sum at 6G underpays badly. At G = 136,549 kroner (NAV, from 1 May 2026), 6G is 819,294 kroner.

Termination pays out both years. All accrued feriepenger fall due on the last ordinary payday before fratreden (s. 11 no. 3), including what accrued in the current calendar year. It is the item most often missing from a final settlement.

Read more: Annual leave in Norway: the day count, the over-60 rule, the hovedferie window and the two 12-day quotas. And Holiday pay in Norway: all four rates, the feriepengegrunnlag and the 6G split worked through. Or run one person through the feriepenger calculator.

Who pays for sick leave, and for how long?

You do, for 16 calendar days, and calendar days include the weekends (folketrygdloven s. 8-19). From day 17, folketrygden takes over.

Three things get missed. A new absence starting within 16 calendar days of the end of the previous one continues the same arbeidsgiverperiode rather than opening a fresh sixteen days of liability. Count from the last day of the previous absence, not from the calendar month. The 6G cap applies throughout, the employer period included, not only once NAV takes over. And NAV publishes no numeric deadline for the inntektsmelding: it says only that it goes as soon as the arbeidsgiverperiode is over, so any guide quoting a day count is not taking it from a NAV source.

Read more: Sick pay in Norway: the sixteen-day gap, egenmelding and what an IA arrangement changes, refusjon, and the follow-up duty that runs on a separate clock.

How is working time regulated?

Nine hours in 24 and 40 in seven (arbeidsmiljøloven s. 10-4), reduced to 38 for døgnkontinuerlig shift work and 36 for helkontinuerlig. The 37.5-hour week common in Norwegian offices is a collective-agreement figure, not a statutory one.

The last row is the one that matters: the eighth paragraph caps total working time and no agreement can derogate from it. The overtime supplement is at least 40 per cent, and rest is 11 hours daily and 35 weekly.

Two traps. Merarbeid is not overtime: a part-timer’s extra hours inside a full-timer’s alminnelig arbeidstid do not carry the statutory supplement; the test is the 9/40 line, not the stillingsprosent. And a fixed salary does not exempt anyone from the hours record (s. 10-7), which sets no preparation deadline and no retention period despite both figures circulating widely.

Read more: Working time rules in Norway: the three tiers in full, averaging, særlig uavhengig stilling, and the seven-day contract deadline that replaced the old one-month rule.

Which collective agreement binds you?

Membership, or your own signature. Nothing else: an unorganised undertaking does not become bound because its competitors are (arbeidstvistloven s. 4).

Except through allmenngjøring. Allmenngjøringsloven empowers Tariffnemnda to make parts of a tariffavtale apply to all workers in a sector or area, including undertakings that are party to nothing. The Act names no sectors itself: each is a separate forskrift, which makes this a sector-by-sector question.

That is also where Norway’s only minimum wages come from. Arbeidstilsynet is explicit that there is a statutory minimum wage in ten sectors and none in any other: the motor trade, construction sites, the electrical trades, fish processing, road haulage, agriculture and horticulture, accommodation and catering, coach transport, cleaning, and shipyards.

Once bound, section 6 makes the agreement’s minimum terms ufravikelige: an individual contract cannot give worse terms, and the employee’s consent does not repair one that does.

Read more: Collective agreements in Norway: what being bound actually commits you to, fredsplikt, business transfers, and a coverage figure we deliberately do not publish.

What are the recurring deadlines?

The same rhythm every year, whatever your headcount. Four clocks run:

Beyond these sit deadlines that do not come from the Acts on this page: the a-melding, withholding tax and employer’s National Insurance contributions. A dated listing covering the whole year is in the Norway HR compliance calendar, which is the canonical source for those dates.

Where employers most often go wrong

• Counting leave in Monday-to-Friday days rather than virkedager, which overstates every balance.
• Using 12 per cent as though it were statutory, or applying the 6G cap to the whole holiday pay sum instead of only to the over-60 supplement.
• Counting working days rather than calendar days in the arbeidsgiverperiode, and treating a new absence within 16 days as an entirely new period.
• Quoting a day count as the inntektsmelding deadline when NAV publishes none, and presenting the four-egenmelding-periods limit as statute rather than IA practice.
• Paying merarbeid as overtime without checking the 9/40 line, and exempting salaried staff from hour records without assessing whether the role really is særlig uavhengig.

How does Taito.ai help with this?

The mistakes above rarely come from not knowing the law. They come from leave balances, the opptjeningsår, the feriepengegrunnlag, start dates and absence history each living in its own spreadsheet, where every employee is a manually maintained row, and where the 6G split for employees over 60 is not modelled at all.

Taito.ai is a people operations system, not a replacement for payroll or for legal advice. It does not track legislative changes, it does not decide which tariffavtale binds your undertaking, and it does not file the inntektsmelding with NAV. What it does is the part a spreadsheet does worst: keeping employee data, roles, absences and leave policies together and versioned per employee, so the same rule is applied the same way to everyone it covers.

Start a free trial or see how Taito.ai works.