Holiday allowance

A statutory extra of 8,00%

Holiday allowance (vakantiegeld, or in law vakantiebijslag) is an extra payment on top of your salary that almost every employee in the Netherlands is entitled to. The legal minimum is 8,00% of your gross annual pay, set by article 15 of the Minimum Wage Act (WML). Many collective agreements are more generous, but 8,00% is the floor everyone can count on. The figures on this page are those in force for 2026; nobody has signed them off.

Accrued monthly, paid as a lump

You build the allowance up gradually — a little is reserved from every month you work — but you usually receive it in one go. Most employers pay it out as a single lump sum in May or June, which is why late spring is when many people in the Netherlands book a holiday. If you leave a job partway through the year, the allowance you have accrued so far is paid out with your final salary. Because it is calculated on your gross pay, a higher salary means a proportionally higher lump sum.

When it has to be paid

“May or June” is the practice; the statute is more precise. Article 17 of the WML says the holiday allowance accrued over the period up to and including the end of May is paid out in the month of June. That may be varied by public regulation or written agreement — your collective agreement or contract can name a different month — but payment must happen at least once per calendar year. If your employment ends mid-year, the amount you have accrued by then is paid out. So receiving nothing in May is not itself a problem; receiving nothing across a whole calendar year is.

Holiday allowance and the minimum wage: on top, not included

A common question: is the holiday allowance already inside the minimum wage? It is not. The WML defines the pay against which the minimum is measured expressly excluding holiday allowances. Someone earning the statutory minimum hourly wage is therefore owed the 8,00% allowance on top of it, not inside it. A vacancy advertising a minimum wage “including holiday allowance” is in effect offering less per hour than the statutory minimum, which is not permitted.

The allowance is calculated on the pay borne by the employer, and on certain benefits received during the employment — although the portion of that pay above three times the minimum wage is left out of account.

How it is taxed — and why the lump feels smaller

Holiday allowance is taxable pay like any other, so wage tax is withheld from it. In a normal payroll it is taxed through the special-payments table (tabel bijzondere beloningen), which applies your marginal combined rate — the rate on your top slice of income — rather than an average. Because it can also nudge the income-dependent tax credits further into their phase-out, the effective rate on the lump is often noticeably higher than the average rate on your monthly salary. That is why a 8,00% gross allowance lands as a distinctly smaller net amount, and why it surprises people every May.

The incl./excl. toggle in the calculator

Salaries are sometimes quoted “including 8,00% vakantiegeld” and sometimes “excluding” it, which makes offers hard to compare. The calculator has a toggle for exactly this: choose whether the gross you entered already contains the 8,00%or not. Switching it on adds the allowance to the annual base so it is carried through the net calculation, letting you compare two offers on the same footing.

One honest caveat about this version: the calculator folds the 8,00% into the annual taxable base and runs it through the same bracket-and-credit maths as the rest of your pay. It does not separately model the special-payments table, so its treatment of the lump is a deliberate simplification — good for an order-of-magnitude comparison, not for predicting the exact net of your May payment to the cent. This is disclosed as an open item rather than smoothed over.