If you run a micro business, “legal news” only matters when it touches cash flow and admin time. A sleeping employment contract does exactly that. One day it’s a quiet file, no wages paid, no shifts scheduled, no invoices to raise. The next day it becomes a disputed final settlement with hours, rates, and expectations flying around, right when you’re trying to close the year and keep your team stable.
A “slapend dienstverband” is the Dutch practice of leaving an employment contract in place after two years of sickness, when the legal wage-payment duty ends, even though the employer is allowed to terminate for long-term incapacity. In the famous Xella line of cases, the Supreme Court made it clear that keeping a contract “asleep” just to avoid paying the statutory transition payment (transitievergoeding) is generally not acceptable; employers are expected to cooperate with ending it, unless there’s a real, justified reason to keep it alive, such as concrete reintegration prospects.
So where does holiday leave fit in? That’s the sharp edge of the December 19, 2025 ruling from the District Court of Noord-Nederland: the judge held that in a sleeping employment contract there is no right to annual leave with continued pay, because “continued pay” presumes there is pay to continue. If there is no wage entitlement anymore, there is nothing to “maintain.” The court also leaned on the human logic behind paid leave: it exists to recover from work and protect health, and that purpose doesn’t land the same way when there is no work and no active reintegration path.
This matters because 2025 also brought the opposite sound from another court. In August 2025, a Gelderland decision treated EU rules on paid annual leave as strong enough to push past the Dutch rule that links holiday accrual to wage entitlement, essentially saying: the right to paid leave is European, and the “no wages, no leave” limitation cannot always stand. The government, meanwhile, publicly took the position that Dutch law is not (yet) out of line with EU law and that the Gelderland decision is not enough to justify changing legislation.
For you, the practical takeaway is not “pick a side,” but “don’t let uncertainty grow in the dark.” A sleeping contract is rarely neutral: it keeps obligations ambiguous, files open, and trust strained. If reintegration is genuinely still on the table, treat it like a living case, document steps, keep agreements clear, and track leave consistently. If it isn’t, then dragging the contract forward usually increases your exposure to claims and misunderstandings at the end (holiday hours, final settlement items, and the transitievergoeding), and it raises the chance you end up paying for professional cleanup you could have avoided with earlier decisions.
The calm fix is small and boring, and that’s exactly why it works. Put a hard review moment around the two-year sickness mark (104 weeks), decide whether the relationship is realistically moving toward work again, and act accordingly. Keep your payroll/HR records “court-proof” even when nothing is happening. And when you do end it, make the final agreement and payslip painfully explicit about what is and isn’t being paid out. The goal isn’t to win an argument later; it’s to prevent one from starting, so your business can get back to the work that actually pays your bills.
Uitspraak Rechtbank Noord-Nederland, 19 december 2025, ECLI:NL:RBNNE:2025:5517
