If you run a small business, unused leave is not a soft HR topic. It’s scheduling pressure, payroll liability, and when it goes wrong, a trust issue that lands right on your desk between invoices and VAT. The quiet moment to look at it is now, not when someone resigns or when summer planning hits and your team suddenly “discovers” a pile of days.
In the Netherlands, employees build up wettelijke vakantiedagen (statutory paid holiday): the legal minimum is four times the weekly working hours (so 20 days for a full-time 40-hour week). Those statutory days don’t stay valid forever. In principle they expire six months after the end of the year in which they were earned, so days earned in 2025 are meant to expire on 1 July 2026. Extra days above the legal minimum (bovenwettelijke days) follow different rules and typically have a much longer time limit (often five years), unless your contract or collective agreement says otherwise.
Here is the catch that trips up many micro-employers: expiry is not something you can assume. Dutch case law, leaning on EU rules, expects you to actively enable and inform employees, clearly and in time, about their remaining days and the consequence of not taking them. If you cannot show you did that, you may not be able to rely on expiry (and even the longer limitation period can fail you). That is not theory; the Dutch Supreme Court confirmed this line of thinking in 2023, and the EU “Max Planck” case sits underneath it.
A familiar situation: a small agency finally hires a steady team, work is busy, everyone “will take leave later,” and nobody wants to be the person who pushes it. Then one employee leaves. At the end-of-employment settlement, unused holiday has to be valued and paid out, and the numbers can sting. What felt like a harmless carry-over turns into a cost, a debate about what was said when, and an awkward feeling that the admin wasn’t under control.
The fix is not complicated, but it must be deliberate. Keep a simple, regular view of leave balances (monthly is enough for most small teams), and make sure your payroll/HR system distinguishes statutory from extra days. Communicate in writing, short, clear, repeatable, so you can prove you informed people and gave them a real chance to take time off. Plan capacity so “we’re too busy” doesn’t become permanent, and treat 1 July as a real internal deadline for last year’s statutory days. And remember: you generally cannot “solve” statutory leave by paying it out during employment; it is meant to be taken as rest, not converted into cash.
Holiday time is one of those areas where good management looks quietly boring: a clean balance, a clear reminder, a calm yes to time off, and no surprises in the final payslip. If you tighten this now, you protect cash flow, reduce legal risk, and just as importantly, signal that you run a reliable shop where agreements actually mean something.
