Spanish holiday entitlement calculator (vacaciones anuales)
Article 38.1 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores sets the minimum at thirty días naturales — calendar days, weekends included. That is a little over four and a quarter weeks, which on a five-day week is about 21.4 working days, not 30.
Worked example · Days Entitled
With Days you work per week of 5, this model computes Days Entitled of 21.40. See the full working.
✓ Verified against 6 self-test cases Updated for 2026 · sources checked 2026-10-11
How vacaciones anuales in Spain is calculated
*"En ningún caso la duración será inferior a treinta días naturales."* The unit is the whole story. A **día natural** is a calendar day, weekends and public holidays included, so thirty of them span just over four and a quarter weeks — roughly **21.4 working days** on a five-day week.
**Read as bare numbers, Spain looks like the most generous system in Europe and it is close to the least.** Thirty beats the UK’s 28, Germany’s 24 and the Netherlands’ twenty. Converted into working days it is 21.4 against the UK’s 28 and Austria’s 25, and only Germany’s 20 is lower. That inversion is the single clearest case of why this family converts every figure into the reader’s own week rather than printing the statute’s number.
**Twenty-two días laborables is a real figure, but it is not article 38.** Most Spanish collective agreements restate the minimum in working days and land on 22, which is the agreement improving slightly on the statutory floor. This page converts the floor instead of asserting a working-day number the law does not contain — and article 38 states no pro-rata rule for a part year either, so the proportional figure here is disclosed as this page’s arithmetic rather than as the statute’s.
Worked example
ShowHide the full working: 6 inputs, 6 computed steps
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Days you work per week | 5 |
| Leave year starts (YYYY-MM-DD) | 2026-01-01 |
| Leave year ends (YYYY-MM-DD) | 2026-12-31 |
| First day worked in it (YYYY-MM-DD) | 2026-01-01 |
| Last day worked in it (YYYY-MM-DD) | 2026-12-31 |
| Days already taken | 0 |
| Computed by the engine | |
| Year Length Days | 365 |
| Present Days | 365 |
| Accrual Fraction | 1 |
| Calendar Days Entitled ✓ pinned | 30 |
| Days Entitled ✓ pinned | 21.4 |
| Days Remaining | 21.4 |
Every computed row comes from the engine, run on the inputs above. Rows marked ✓ pinned are also fixed by a published self-test, so a change to the model that moved them would fail its own tests.
Frequently asked questions
¿Cuántos días de vacaciones al año?
Treinta días naturales como mínimo, según el artículo 38.1 del Estatuto de los Trabajadores. Son días naturales, no laborables — unos 21,4 días de trabajo en una semana de cinco días.
Are the 30 days working days or calendar days?
Calendar days. Article 38.1 says "días naturales", which includes weekends. Thirty calendar days is about four and a quarter weeks.
Why do people say 22 days?
Because most collective agreements restate the minimum in working days and settle on 22, slightly above the statutory floor. That number comes from the agreement, not from article 38.
What if I only worked part of the year?
Article 38 does not say. This page pro-rates by the share of the leave year you worked, which is standard practice, and says so rather than implying the statute sets the rule.
Sources
- Estatuto de los Trabajadores, art. 38.1 — texto consolidado (treinta días naturales) · checked 2026-10-11
Estimate. Not tax advice. The verification badge means the model reproduces the stated formula through 6 self-test cases; the sources support that the formula matches the rules.
Check the arithmetic yourself: how this calculator is verified — the formula behind every derived value, the 6 test cases the engine reproduces, and what the badge does and does not claim. Also available as machine-readable JSON.
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