Danish Special Holidays (Særlige feriedage)

The Danish special holidays plugin grants særlige feriedage — the five extra vacation days the Danish state sector agreement gives on top of ordinary vacation (ferievejledningen §2.4).

What makes them different from ordinary vacation is the delay. They are earned during one calendar year, but cannot be taken until the following 1 May, and then have to be used by 30 April the year after that. So the days an employee earns during 2025 arrive on 1 May 2026 and lapse on 30 April 2027.

When to use

Use this plugin when your agreement grants særlige feriedage — the Danish state agreement (ferieaftalen) and the agreements that reference it. The defaults match it, so in most cases you add the plugin and change nothing.

It is a separate plugin from Danish Vacation , and the two normally sit on different policies and different accounts: ordinary vacation runs on its own September–August vacation year, while these five days run on the calendar year and the 1 May–30 April holding period. Keeping them apart is what lets each expire on its own schedule.

Parameters

How it works

The entitlement is granted once a year, on 1 May, in a single amount, sized by how much of the previous calendar year the employee was employed:

Three consequences are worth knowing, because they are what the agreement says rather than what you might expect:

• Part-time makes no difference. “Beskæftigelsesgraden har ikke betydning” — a half-time employee earns the same 5 days as a full-time one. Days, not hours.
• A partial month counts by its own length. An employee starting 10 October earns 22/31 of that month, and one starting 10 November earns 21/30. The month’s real length is used, so February counts as 28 or 29 days.
• The often-quoted rate of 0,42 days per month is simply the one-month row of the table above. Twelve months come to exactly 5,00 — not 5,04 — because the entitlement is a proportion of the year rather than a monthly quantum that happens to be repeated twelve times.

Employees who leave

mTime holds only what an employee can actually take. If employment ends on or before 1 May, nothing is granted — the holding period opens as they leave, so there would be nothing to take. The entitlement they earned is still owed to them; it is settled in the salary system, not here.

An employee who leaves later keeps whatever they have not used until their last day, and the remainder lapses.

Days that arrive after 1 May

If a policy is assigned, an employment record entered, or a workspace brought online after 1 May, the grant is booked on the day mTime first sees it rather than on 1 May. The amount and the 30 April expiry are unchanged — only the booking date moves, so the days are never lost to a late start.

The mTIME 5 compatibility setting

mTIME 5 calculates these days differently, and its results do not match the ferievejledning. With the setting on, mTime reproduces mTIME 5 instead of the agreement:

The two agree for one, two and twelve whole months, and differ everywhere else. mTIME 5 applies a monthly rate rounded up to 0,42 and then caps the year at 5, and it measures a partial month against a fixed 30 days rather than the month’s real length.

Turning the setting off later switches the calculation back to the agreement, but does not restack days already granted.

Examples

The Danish state agreement (the default)

1. Create a time account of type Time off for særlige feriedage, measured in days
2. Add a time off policy pointing at that account
3. Select the Danish Special Holidays accrual plugin
4. Leave every parameter at its default

An employee employed all of 2025 receives 5,00 days on 1 May 2026, to be used by 30 April 2027.

An employee hired part-way through the earning year

No configuration needed — the proportion is automatic. Someone hired 1 October 2025 was employed for three whole months of the earning year and receives 1,25 days on 1 May 2026.

A workspace migrating from mTIME 5

1. Add the plugin as above
2. Turn on mTIME 5 compatibility

Balances then match what mTIME 5 would have produced, at the cost of no longer following the ferievejledning.

Troubleshooting