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The new law on holiday and the search for answers

We set out on a mission a few weeks ago – to answer your questions about the new law on holiday accrual with a strong belief that there would be plenty of places to go to find an answer. Well we must say that we have learned a lesson or two on this mission…

The first question

One of the questions we received was on when you start working after September 1, 2019 – will you then only start to accrue holiday accrual after September 1, 2020 – that seems like a long time to wait to be able to take some paid holiday.

Part of the answer we found online, where it was made clear that if you are entering the job market in the last half year of 2019 then it is possible to apply for an advance on your holiday accrual through Lønmodtagernes Feriemidler.

You can apply for this holiday accrual from May 1, 2020 at Lønmodtagerens Feriemidler, this secures you a bit of paid holiday in the summer of 2020.

Through them you can apply for a maximum of 8,4 days of holiday accrual depending on how many months you have worked from September to December this year.


You can apply for this holiday accrual from May 1, 2020 at Lønmodtagerens Feriemidler, this secures you a bit of paid holiday in the summer of 2020.

There is a quite illustrative video and some nice graphs. You’ll find it here:

The second question

However, we haven´t become any wiser on what happens to those of you getting your first job in Denmark on say January 1, 2020 – will you have to wait to accrue holiday accrual from September 1, 2020? It is always nice to know what to expect.

Well this question and the question on what to do with your accrued holiday if you leave before you retire were the questions that we decided to bring with us to someone who has more knowledge within this area than we do. We already knew that if you give up your address in Denmark and decide to live in another a country on a more permanent basis, then you are entitled to get your accrued holiday, but how to go about it?

This is where our mission really began.

We of course started by consulting our google search engine – no luck, not even in Danish (might be our google search skills that are imperfect) – but we also preferred to talk to a real-life person.
First step was of course to consult the original agreement made on this law – no luck!
First calls were made to the unemployment benefit funds, as they know a lot that is work related and get in contact with many workers every day, we believed that they might be updated on this matter. That was not the case, their advice was to call a union.

The unions

We called several unions, however the ones that we got in touch with were not interested in providing the information to a bigger amount of people. Their arguments for this dismissive attitude was that they either couldn’t see this as being their task or there weren’t enough in it for them!
Okay, this made us look in another direction – the authorities – they must be able to help us – they are here to help us right. First, we talked with the Ministry of Employment and they send us to the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment…

To be continued…