How much annual leave do you get in South Africa?

Ask ten South African employees how much annual leave they get and you will hear "15 days", "21 days", "it depends on the company" and "I lose whatever I do not take by December". Some of those answers are right, some are half right, and one costs people real money every year. The rules are in sections 20 and 21 of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997, the BCEA, with the payout rules in section 40. This guide explains how much leave the law guarantees, how it builds up, who decides when you take it, whether untaken leave can be lost, and what happens to your balance when the job ends.

This guide is part of our Leave in South Africa: every type of leave and your rights, which links every guide on the topic.

The BCEA sets a floor. Your contract, a company policy, a sectoral determination or a bargaining council agreement can give you more, never less.

The basic entitlement: 21 consecutive days

Section 20(2)(a) says your employer must grant you at least 21 consecutive days of annual leave on full pay for each annual leave cycle. Twenty-one consecutive days is three calendar weeks. If you work a five-day week, three weeks contain 15 working days. If you work a six-day week, they contain 18. That is why HR departments talk about "15 days a year": it is the same entitlement expressed in working days.

The leave chapter applies to every employee who works 24 hours or more a month for the employer (section 19(1)). Unlike the rules on overtime and Sunday pay, it is not switched off for people who earn above the BCEA earnings threshold. Senior managers, high earners and domestic workers all have the same minimum leave.

If a public holiday falls on a day of your annual leave that you would ordinarily have worked, section 20(8) gives you an extra day of paid leave. A week's leave over Freedom Day therefore costs you four days, not five.

The leave cycle is not the calendar year

Section 20(1) defines the annual leave cycle as 12 months of employment with the same employer, starting on the day you began work, and then running from the end of each previous cycle. If you started on 1 June, your cycle runs from 1 June to 31 May, whatever the company's financial year or the calendar says.

Many employers run leave on the calendar year for convenience. That is acceptable as long as nobody ends up with less than the statutory minimum, which is most at risk in the first and last part-year of employment.

The two alternatives: one day for every 17

By agreement, the employer may use one of two other methods instead of the 21 days (sections 20(2)(b) and (c)):

• one day of annual leave on full pay for every 17 days on which you worked or were entitled to be paid; or
• one hour of annual leave on full pay for every 17 hours on which you worked or were entitled to be paid.

These methods exist for people whose working pattern does not fit a neat week: part-time staff, people on rotating shifts, and casual workers who work more than 24 hours a month. Over a full year on a five-day week, about 260 paid days divided by 17 gives roughly 15 days, the same as the main rule. For someone working three days a week, about 156 days divided by 17 gives roughly nine days.

Note the words "or were entitled to be paid". Public holidays, paid sick days and days of paid leave count towards the 17, not only days at your desk.

Who decides when you take leave

Section 20(10) says annual leave must be taken in accordance with an agreement between you and the employer or, if there is no agreement, at a time the employer decides. So the employer can refuse a particular week, require leave to be taken during a December shutdown, or ask you to take leave during a quiet period. It cannot simply refuse leave altogether. Section 20(4) obliges it to grant your annual leave no later than six months after the end of the cycle in which it accrued.

Section 20(3) entitles you to take the leave on consecutive days, so an employer cannot insist on breaking your entitlement into scattered single days. You can agree to take odd days, and section 20(7) lets the employer count occasional paid days off that you asked for against your annual leave.

The Act also protects the purpose of leave, which is rest. The employer may not require or permit you to take annual leave during another period of statutory leave, such as sick leave, family responsibility leave or parental leave, or during a notice period (section 20(5)). If you ask in writing, it must let you take annual leave during a period of unpaid leave (section 20(6)). And it may not require or permit you to work for it while you are on annual leave (section 20(9)).

What you are paid while on leave

Section 21 says leave pay must be at least what you would have earned for working the same period, calculated at your rate of pay immediately before the leave starts. It must be paid before the leave begins or, by agreement, on your usual pay day. A salary increase that took effect the month before your leave is therefore reflected in your leave pay.

Section 20(11) forbids the employer from paying you instead of granting leave, except on termination. An offer to "buy back" your statutory leave while you are still employed is not lawful, however attractive the cash.

Can untaken leave be lost?

This is where most of the misunderstanding lies. While you remain employed, your statutory leave does not disappear at the end of the calendar year or the end of the cycle. The employer must still grant it during the six months after the cycle ends.

What happens after those six months is less comfortable. In Jardine v Tongaat-Hulett (2003) the Labour Court suggested leave was not automatically lost. But in Jooste v Kohler Packaging (2004), and then in Ludick v Rural Maintenance (Pty) Ltd (2014) 2 BLLR 178 (LC), which set out to resolve the conflict, the court held that statutory leave not taken within the cycle and the following six months is forfeited. The Labour Court repeated that view in Hartley v SMD Trading Group CC [2024] ZALCD 16. These are Labour Court decisions rather than a ruling of the Labour Appeal Court or the Constitutional Court, so the point could still be argued, but they are the current weight of authority.

Two qualifications matter in practice. First, the forfeiture line applies to the statutory minimum. Extra leave that your contract gives you falls outside the Act unless an agreement says otherwise (section 19(2)), so whether it can be carried over or lost depends on your contract or policy. Second, where you asked for leave in time and the employer refused it, there is a strong argument that the employer cannot rely on its own refusal to wipe out your leave. The courts have not settled that point in a way we could confirm, which is exactly why written leave requests are worth keeping.

Leave when you leave the job

On termination, section 40 requires the employer to pay you for annual leave due for a completed cycle that you have not taken and, if you have been employed for longer than four months, for leave accrued in the current, incomplete cycle at no less than one day's pay for every 17 days worked or paid. This applies whether you resign, are dismissed, are retrenched or reach the end of a fixed-term contract. The detail of the calculation, and what to do if the payout is missing, is in our guide to being paid for unused leave when you leave a job, and the leave payout calculator works out the figure.

Annual leave is the only leave that is paid out. Unused sick leave is not, which is one reason the rules for sick leave work so differently.

Worked example

This example is illustrative. Lerato starts work as an administrator on 1 March 2025, works a five-day week and earns R18 000 a month. Her first leave cycle runs from 1 March 2025 to 28 February 2026, and in it she earns 15 working days. She takes five days over December 2025, leaving ten.

Her employer must let her take those ten days by 31 August 2026. Lerato emails a request for two weeks in July 2026; her manager replies that July is too busy and offers August instead. That is lawful: the employer may decide the timing, as long as she gets the leave within the six months.

Change the facts: Lerato never asks, and the ten days are still untaken on 1 September 2026. On the Labour Court authority described above, those ten statutory days are probably forfeited. Had she asked in July and been refused outright, with no alternative offered, she would have a good argument that they survive.

Now suppose she resigns, with her last day on 31 October 2026. For the current cycle, which began on 1 March 2026, she has about 175 days worked or paid. Divided by 17, that is about 10.3 days of leave. At a daily rate of about R830 (R18 000 times 12, divided by 260 working days), her employer owes her roughly R8 550 for that leave, plus anything else still due from the previous cycle.

What to do

1. Work out your cycle dates from your start date, and check whether your contract or a bargaining council agreement gives more than 15 working days.
2. Ask for your leave balance in writing. Employers must keep records of leave, and payslips often show the balance.
3. Request leave in writing, well before the six-month deadline for each cycle, and keep the reply. If you are refused, ask for alternative dates in writing.
4. Do not accept cash for statutory leave while you are employed, and do not agree to forfeit leave you have requested and been refused.
5. If leave pay is withheld or a payout is short, write to the employer with your calculation, then use the routes in our guide on what to do when your employer does not pay you: a labour inspector, or the CCMA if you earn below the earnings threshold.