Remaining Leave: When It Expires and When It Does Not
The turn of the year brings the same question every time: what happens to the leave days left over? The answer has shifted considerably in recent years. Where the principle used to be that untaken leave simply lapsed, today an employer's duty to give notice sits at the centre — and without it, nothing lapses at all.
The statutory starting point
§ 7 (3) BUrlG sets out the basic rule: leave must be granted and taken within the current calendar year. Carrying it over into the next calendar year is only permissible where urgent operational reasons, or reasons personal to the employee, justify it. In the event of a carry-over, the leave must be granted and taken in the first three months of the following calendar year.
That produces two key dates: 31 December as the ordinary expiry, and 31 March as the extended deadline where a carry-over is permitted. Urgent operational reasons include order peaks or sickness-driven staffing gaps, personal reasons chiefly your own illness or caring for close relatives. A mere wish to take the leave later is not enough.
The duty to give notice: the decisive turn
The European Court of Justice has held that leave entitlements can only be lost if the employer first put the employee in a position actually to take the leave. The German labour courts have adopted and refined that requirement: the employer must give timely and clear notice of the precise amount of outstanding leave and of the fact that it will lapse if not taken.
Timely means early enough for the leave still to be taken in the remaining year, in practice by late summer or early autumn at the latest. Clear means individual and with a concrete number of days, not a general notice board and not buried in a circular. If the employer fails to meet this requirement, the leave does not expire but rolls into the following year and adds to the new entitlement.
For employees the practical point is this: check whether you received an individual written prompt in the autumn. If none arrived, the days from the previous year are very probably still there. You can work out how many there are in total in the holiday entitlement calculator by entering the days already taken.
If leave does not expire for want of notice, the question of limitation arises. The courts have clarified that the ordinary three-year period only starts running once the employer has met its duty to give notice. Where that notice is permanently absent, entitlements can accumulate over several years — a considerable financial risk for employers and an equally considerable opportunity for employees who have kept their records.
Long-term illness and contractual surplus leave
A special case concerns employees who could not take leave for an extended period because of illness. A separate limit applies here: the entitlement lapses fifteen months after the end of the leave year, that is on 31 March of the year after next. Leave from 2025 therefore expires on 31 March 2027 in the case of continuous incapacity for work. Anyone who was at least intermittently fit for work during the leave year falls back into the ordinary system, and then the duty to give notice applies again.
The separation between statutory minimum leave and contractual surplus also matters. The strict protective rules apply directly only to the statutory part. For the surplus, different expiry rules may be agreed — for instance expiry on 31 December without any notice requirement. That does, however, require a clear and express separation in the contract; where it is missing, the courts assume in case of doubt that the statutory rules govern the entire entitlement.
What to do in practice
Keep your own leave record of days requested, approved and taken, and retain approvals and payslips. Apply for the remaining leave in writing as the year-end approaches — a written request that is refused or left unanswered is the best evidence that you wanted to take the leave.
And do the arithmetic yourself rather than trusting the figure in the staff portal. Alongside the number of remaining days, the holiday entitlement calculator also shows their cash value under § 11 BUrlG — useful when a job change is coming and the days have to be paid out. This overview is a non-binding orientation and does not replace employment law advice in an individual case.