How Public Holidays Work in Netherlands

The Netherlands lists a familiar set of official holidays (erkende feestdagen), yet the most important fact for any employer is that there is no general statutory right to a paid day off on them. Dutch law does not require companies to close on King's Day, Christmas, or Easter Monday. Whether a holiday is a paid non-working day depends almost entirely on the applicable collective labour agreement (CAO) or the individual employment contract. This makes the CAO the real source of truth, and two employees doing similar work under different agreements can end up with different holiday entitlements.

In practice most CAOs and contracts do grant the common Christian holidays plus King's Day, so the everyday experience feels like a normal holiday calendar. Liberation Day (5 May) is the notable exception: for many workers it is a full paid day off mainly every fifth year, and in the intervening years it is often an ordinary working day unless the CAO says otherwise. King's Day (27 April) is the one date that reliably functions as a national celebration, and it moves to 26 April when 27 April is a Sunday.

Weekends add a further complication. The Dutch calendar does not provide substitute days, so a holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is simply lost, with no replacement granted. Because several of these dates are fixed, the real number of days off swings noticeably from year to year, and that variation feeds directly into workforce planning.

For payroll and leave administration, the consequences are significant. Teams must map each employee to the correct CAO, confirm which holidays that agreement treats as paid, and decide how work on a holiday is compensated, since premiums are contractual rather than statutory. Combined with widely used ADV working-time-reduction days, this CAO-driven variation means a single national holiday list cannot be relied on for accurate absence tracking or cost forecasting.