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.

The rules below follow the Swedish Annual Leave Act and the Gröna riksavtalet agreement (Visita–HRF). Check with your accountant before changing any of the rates.

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.

There is a separate vacation model setting — whether the earning year coincides with the taking year or precedes it. It controls when days become available, not where the year boundary sits.

Earned, taken and saved days

Swedish law gives 25 paid vacation days per full vacation year. If someone has been employed for a shorter time, the days are prorated against the employment period.

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.

The balance decreases when a vacation absence is approved — and that applies to all employment forms, including hourly staff. Half days count as half a day. The balance stops at zero and does not go negative.

If you approve vacation for someone with no days left you get a warning, but it does not block. Check the balance first.

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:

The provision is therefore not a payment. Swedish law says vacation pay must be paid in connection with the vacation leave — not continuously. If no vacation is taken, the liability grows, which is exactly what a vacation liability should do.

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 was booked at provisioning.

The rate defaults to 12 % in Vendion. The statutory percentage rule sets 12 % as a floor, and the Gröna riksavtalet agreement has negotiated 12.72 %. If you are covered by the collective agreement, the rate should probably be the latter. Change it under Personal ▸ Inställningar ▸ Lön & avtal 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 times twelve monthly salaries divided by 25 days. At the same time a full pay deduction is made for the day under the agreement — otherwise the person would receive both monthly salary and vacation pay for the same day.

The daily rate is independent of employment length: someone employed for half a year gets fewer paid days but the same daily rate, so the payment prorates itself.

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.

The daily rate for hourly staff is marked preliminary in the data. The reason is that an hourly employee has no contracted annual working time, so the amount approximates the percentage rule. It lands slightly low — around 11.8 % against the agreement's 12.72 % for a full-time worker — and the difference remains as liability instead of disappearing.

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.

To apply the right rate, every saved day carries its vintage — which vacation year it was saved from. The data therefore shows not only how many saved days someone has, but from which years.

The five-year limit: a saved day must be taken within five years of the end of the vacation year it was saved from. After that it is worth nothing.

That is why Vendion takes the oldest saved lot first. Swedish law does not rank the vintages — the order is chosen so no day expires, not because it yields the most money per day.

How many days a leave costs

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

• If the schedule is published for the period, the vacation costs exactly the days the person would have worked
• If the schedule is not published — 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.

What to check with your accountant

• The percentage — 12 % or the agreement's 12.72 %
• The vacation model — coinciding or separate earning year
• 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