Vacation Days and Vacation Pay

Vacation is two things at once: days earned and taken, and money provisioned and paid out. Vendion tracks both, but they do not move in step — and that is exactly what makes vacation hard to reconcile.

This describes Vendion’s vacation calculation. Check that settings, earned days and payments agree with each employee’s terms and your collective agreement. Consult the Swedish Annual Leave Act and Gröna riksavtalet.

The vacation year runs 1 April to 31 March

Vendion's vacation year follows Swedish law and runs from 1 April to 31 March — not the calendar year.

A vacation week in February 2027 therefore belongs to the vacation year that started on 1 April 2026. The year boundary is fixed and cannot be changed.

The vacation year boundary and earning model cannot be selected in settings. Reconcile balances before approving leave if your business uses other terms, such as coinciding earning and vacation years.

Earned, taken and saved days

Swedish law normally gives 25 vacation days, but they are not necessarily all paid. Paid days depend on entitlement earned. Vendion calculates the balance from employment details and recorded absence; check any agreed exceptions.

Open the employee under Personal ▸ Personal and go to the Ledighetssaldo (leave balance) tab. There you see earned, taken and saved days for the current vacation year.

Who sees and changes the balance. The vacation balance and saved days follow payroll permission, including the Vems lön? (whose pay?) choice in the permission group. If your payroll permission is limited to certain groups, you only see and change balances for people in those groups. For others the staff card says the information is shown only to someone with payroll permission for that person, not that there is no balance. Nobody changes their own balance, except administrators. If you ask AI Boss to change a balance you may not touch, it replies that the balance was not saved and why. Seeing your own balance is not affected.

When someone without payroll permission changes the employment. Start date, end date, activation and employment type decide how many days the person earns. If they are changed by someone without payroll permission for the person, the card saves as usual but the balance is not recalculated. Ledighetssaldo (leave balance) then says Saldot är inte omräknat (balance not recalculated), and whoever has payroll permission for the person gets a notice in the bell. Press Räkna om (recalculate) to work out the balance from the new details. The same applies to a new person added by someone without payroll permission: the balance is 0 until someone with payroll permission recalculates it. A manually set balance is not affected.

If you run payroll in Fortnox Lön, Fortnox calculates the balance and the final settlement, and Vendion shows no vacation days of its own — not on the staff card, in the absence view or in the staff portal.

The balance decreases when a vacation absence is approved — and that applies to all employment forms, including hourly staff. A recorded half day counts as 0.5 day in the app balance. Check that the way leave is taken complies with your agreement.

The balance can go negative. Approve ten days for someone with three left and it reads −7. That is deliberate: the system does not stop you granting the leave, but neither does it hide that you did. A negative balance needs follow-up — are the days advanced, or should the request be adjusted?

If you approve vacation for someone with no days left you get a warning, but it does not block. Check the balance first. If you run payroll in Fortnox Lön there is no such warning — the balance lives in Fortnox.

Vacation pay is paid once

This part is worth reading slowly, because it looks like double payment but is not.

Vacation pay has two sides of the same coin:

Vendion’s provision is not a payment. Vacation pay is normally paid in connection with leave. Check any exceptions, final pay and payment in lieu of leave with your payroll administrator.

The withdrawal is a payment to the employee and is therefore part of the contribution base, but it is not a new cost to you — the cost is included at provisioning in Vendion’s data. Check that the corresponding entries have actually been posted in your accounting system.

The rate defaults to 12.72 % in Vendion — the level in Gröna riksavtalet and Hängavtalet Visita. The statutory percentage rule sets 12 % as a floor. If your restaurant was set up before autumn 2026 the rate may still read 12.00; the default was raised then, but existing restaurants were not changed automatically, since the rate is an agreement choice. Check and change it under Personal ▸ Inställningar ▸ Lön (Pay) after checking with your accountant.

Employer contributions on the provision are reported as a separate item and are included in the total employer cost.

How the daily rate is calculated

The daily rate differs between pay forms, and the difference is deliberate.

Monthly salary. The vacation day is paid at the percentage of the pay during the earning year, divided by the number of net vacation days — that is 25 × (working days per week ÷ 5), capped at 25. The earning year is 1 April–31 March in the year before the vacation year: for a vacation day in summer 2027 it is 1 April 2026–31 March 2027 (Annual Leave Act, section 16 b).

The pay that counts is the vacation-qualifying pay: the monthly salary plus unsocial hours, additional hours and overtime among other things, minus the deductions for absence that earns no vacation, such as leave of absence. Vacation pay is never included, and neither is the pay deducted for vacation days during the earning year.

A five-day week gives a denominator of 25; someone working three days a week has 15 net days and therefore a 67 % higher daily amount. That is the point: fewer vacation days are consumed per week off, so each day must be worth more. At the same time a pay deduction is made under the agreement — otherwise the person would receive both monthly salary and vacation pay for the same day. The deduction is per hour when the absence is at most 14 calendar days and per calendar day when it is longer, from the first day that would have been a working day up to and including the day before the return to work. See Payroll Data – Calculate and Export.

Exact once the whole earning year is locked. Vendion reads the pay from the locked payroll months under Personal ▸ Löner (Staff ▸ Payroll). If all twelve months of the earning year are locked in Vendion, the amount is exact. Otherwise it is calculated provisionally on twelve monthly salaries minus the year's five vacation weeks, and Löner warns when you lock the period: Semesterlönen för … är preliminär (the vacation pay for … is provisional).

Example: SEK 30,000 a month full time, five weeks of vacation during the earning year and all twelve months locked gives SEK 1,656.04 per vacation day. Twelve full monthly salaries would have given SEK 1,831.68, but the pay for the vacation days was never paid as salary and must not be counted.

Hourly wage. The vacation day is paid at the hourly rate times the day's scheduled hours, uplifted by the percentage. No pay deduction is needed — there are no shifts to deduct.

Hourly employees’ daily rate is marked preliminary. It uses the hours the absence is calculated to cover and does not constitute a final reconciliation against the full vacation-qualifying earnings. Check the amount against actual earned vacation pay before payment; do not assume any difference always has the same sign.

The agreement's minimum vacation pay per day

Gröna riksavtalet sets a minimum amount per vacation day once the person has been employed for at least three consecutive months: for the vacation year 2026/27 it is SEK 1,675 for those aged 20 or over and SEK 1,269 for younger staff. For part-time staff the amount is reduced by the employment's extent, that is weekly hours divided by 40.

Vendion pays the higher of the vacation pay under the percentage rule and the minimum amount, day by day. This also applies to saved days. Age is checked on the day the vacation day is taken.

Example: SEK 25,000 a month full time gives less than SEK 1,675 a day under the percentage rule, so five vacation days come to SEK 8,375. At 75 % part time the minimum is SEK 1,256.25 a day. At SEK 40,000 a month the percentage rule is higher, and then it applies.

You set the amounts under Personal ▸ Inställningar ▸ Avtal ▸ Lägsta semesterlön per dag (Staff ▸ Settings ▸ Contracts ▸ minimum vacation pay per day), one row per vacation year. If the restaurant has Visita/HRF as its collective agreement, Gröna riksavtalet's amounts are filled in from the start. If you leave the setting empty there is no minimum amount. If you fill it in, the amounts apply even without a collective agreement.

The minimum amount applies to monthly-salaried staff. Hourly staff get it only in the vacation compensation when the employment ends, see below.

Saved days have their own rate and a five-year limit

Swedish law gives the right to save vacation days, and the Gröna riksavtalet agreement pays a saved day at 0.5 % of the calculation base — against 12.72 divided by 25, roughly 0.509 %, for a day from the current year. The difference is small but agreed.

Vendion separates saved days from current-year days. When vacation is taken, saved days are used first, oldest eligible vintage first, and the current year's days after that. The staff card shows a combined balance. For monthly-salaried staff a saved day is paid at 0.5 % of the same annual pay as the current year's days, that is the earning year's vacation-qualifying pay, or the provisional amount when the earning year is not locked. Hourly employees also use the preliminary hourly model for saved days, so reconcile their amount separately.

The five-year limit: saved days must normally be taken within five years, with exceptions including an agreement to use the sixth year in certain circumstances. Vendion’s calculation excludes saved vintages beyond its five-year limit. This does not mean the employee’s rights or any compensation claim automatically disappear. Ask your payroll administrator to investigate older days excluded from the calculation.

That is why Vendion takes the oldest saved lot first. Swedish law does not rank the vintages — therefore check planned leave with the employee.

How many days a leave costs

The number of days deducted depends on whether the schedule is published:

• If published or confirmed shifts exist within the absence period, the vacation costs exactly the days the person would have worked
• If no such schedule exists — the normal case, since vacation is requested months ahead — the system counts Monday to Friday

The judgement looks forward only. A shift lying in the days before the leave says nothing about the days the leave covers, and therefore does not count as a published schedule.

It matters in practice: without that rule, two months of vacation requested before the schedule existed could cost zero vacation days.

Long absence: when vacation pay stops being earned

Sickness, childcare leave (VAB) and parental leave count as if the person had worked when vacation pay is earned, but only up to the limits in the Annual Leave Act (sections 17 and 17 a):

The days after the limit earn no vacation pay. For a monthly-salaried employee the pay for those days is taken out of the vacation basis, so the vacation provision is lower. For an hourly employee no pay for those days is added to the vacation basis.

Parental leave counts per child. Vendion does not know which child the leave is for, so leave with at most fourteen days in between counts as the same child. The count does not restart at a new earning year. If more time than that has passed in between, a new count starts.

Sick for a whole earning year. If the person was sick for the whole previous earning year, with no break longer than fourteen days in a row, continued sick leave no longer earns vacation pay.

Example: on parental leave from 1 April 2026 with SEK 30,000 a month. Day 120 is 29 July. From 30 July the leave earns no vacation pay, and the year's vacation provision is SEK 15,017.81 instead of SEK 45,792.

A single parent has 180 days for VAB and parental leave. Vendion does not know who is a single parent and counts 120 days for everyone. When someone passes 120 days, Personal ▸ Löner warns when you lock the period. If it concerns a single parent the provision is too low and needs correcting by hand.

Check the balance. The number of earned vacation days in the balance is calculated separately. There, parental leave is counted per vacation year rather than per child, and the rule about a whole year of sick leave is not included. Someone on parental leave across a year boundary may therefore get too many earned days in the balance.

When the employment ends

If the person has vacation left when the employment ends, it is paid out as vacation compensation in the payroll data for the month the end date falls in. It appears as Slutreglering (final settlement) in the vacation column under Personal ▸ Löner. If you run payroll in Fortnox Lön, Fortnox calculates the compensation.

The days left are the earned days plus the saved days at the start of the vacation year, minus the days taken during the year. Because saved days are taken first, only saved days that have not been taken count as saved, and only they get the 0.5 % rate. Example: 13 earned and 5 saved days, and 5 days taken. The leave used the saved days, so 13 days are left, all from this year.

Monthly-salaried staff get the days left times the daily rate above, with the same earning-year pay and the same provisional marking when the earning year is not locked. After twelve months of employment the minimum amount per day also applies. With SEK 30,000 a month, no vacation during the earning year and all twelve months locked, the daily rate is SEK 1,831.68, and 13 days left gives SEK 23,811.84.

Hourly staff get the percentage of the vacation-qualifying pay since 1 April (or since the employment started), minus the vacation pay already paid out over the same time. The compensation is never negative. For each saved day among those left, 0.5 % of the previous earning year's pay is added. The minimum amount per day applies after twelve months of employment, and only when Avtalad arbetstid (agreed working hours) is filled in on the staff card, because otherwise Vendion does not know the person's extent.

Example: SEK 160/h at half time, SEK 80,000 in pay since 1 April and SEK 3,607.04 in vacation pay already paid out: 12.72 % × 80,000 − 3,607.04 = SEK 6,568.96.

Hourly staff's compensation is calculated from the locked payroll months. If any earlier month since 1 April is not locked, or with saved days any month in the previous earning year, it is calculated provisionally as the days left × 8 hours × the hourly wage, uplifted by the percentage. Löner then says the amount is provisional. If the person has already been paid everything and has nothing else in the month, no row is shown for them.

Extra staff can be paid holiday pay with their wages

Section 5 of the Swedish Annual Leave Act allows holiday pay to be paid with wages instead of as paid leave, when the employment is intended to last at most three months and you have agreed that no leave will be scheduled. Extra staff hired per shift are the usual example. The Gröna riksavtalet agreement makes it the main rule for employment for single days (§ 17 mom 7).

Turn it on per person: open the employee under Personal ▸ Personal, choose Redigera (edit) and turn on Semesterersättning betalas ut med lönen (holiday pay paid with wages) under Employment. The switch only exists for hourly and fixed-term staff. A permanent employee gets vacation pay when the vacation is taken (section 26).

When it is on:

• The person earns no vacation days. The leave balance and the staff portal show that the holiday pay comes with the wages instead.
• The percentage counts as holiday pay with wages in the payroll data, not as a provision to the vacation liability. Employer contributions are taken directly, and nothing is posted to the vacation liability.
• The person cannot request vacation. If they want time off, simply do not schedule them.
• New employment contracts get the term automatically: that no leave is scheduled and which percentage is paid with the wages. The contract can only be created as Extra vid behov (as needed), or as Säsong or Vikariat (seasonal or temporary cover) of at most three months.

Your payroll system calculates the amount. Vendion sends the hours as usual but no amount for the holiday pay. In Fortnox Lön, add salary type 224 "Semesterersättning i anslutning till lön" to the person and set the percentage in the agreement's vacation settings. If you have Fortnox Lön connected, the notification centre reminds you.

The choice applies to the whole employment. Once pay within the employment is locked, it cannot be changed in either direction. To switch, end the employment — the final pay settles earned vacation — and rehire with a new start date.

What to check with your accountant

• The percentage — 12 % or the agreement's 12.72 %
• Minimum vacation pay per day — that the amounts under Personal ▸ Inställningar ▸ Avtal match your agreement, or that the setting is empty if you have no minimum amount
• Locked months — vacation pay and hourly staff's vacation compensation are exact only once the months they are calculated on are locked
• The vacation liability in your books — that the provision and its employer contributions land on the right accounts
• The preliminary daily rate for hourly staff — how you want to handle the gap against the percentage rule
• Extra staff paid holiday pay with wages — that the employments meet the conditions in section 5 of the Annual Leave Act and that your payroll system pays the holiday pay