According to a survey, only 47% of employees in Germany receive holiday pay. There are large variations between individual industries and regions.
Fewer than half of all employees in the German private sector receive holiday pay. As the collective bargaining file of the Hans Böckler Foundation Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) announced today, holiday pay for employees in eastern Germany (34%) is generally lower than for employees in the west (49%). “This difference is mainly due to significantly lower collective bargaining coverage in eastern Germany,” the foundation explained.
According to an online survey of nearly 60,000 people, whether employees receive vacation pay depends on the size of the company and the total monthly salary. The more people working in a company and the higher the income, the greater the chance of receiving corresponding special allowances. At the same time, WSI highlights that larger companies tend to be more bound by collective bargaining agreements, and wage levels are linked to this.
In companies bound by collective agreements, the proportion of employees with holiday pay is 74%, thus significantly higher than the proportion of private companies without collective agreements (35%). For Germany as a whole, the figure is 47%.
Compare high vacation pay metal industry
How much money actually goes into your vacation or household budget varies by industry. The WSI assessed 22 collective bargaining sectors and found payments ranging from €180 for agricultural workers in East Germany to €2,686 for workers in the wood and plastic industries in West Germany. There is also relatively more holiday pay in the metals industry and less in the hospitality industry.
Vacation pay is also higher in the West than in the East. The exceptions are the insurance, chemical industry, printing and building cleaning industries, where East and West Germany pay the same holiday allowance.
“Originally, collectively negotiated leave pay, introduced in many industries since the 1960s, was intended to allow more employees to take annual leave,” says Thorsten Schulten, head of WSI’s Collective Bargaining Archive. Currently, special allowances are more of a buffer for many employees to compensate for increased living costs. Worse, “employees in low-wage sectors are once again the losers because they work much less frequently in companies with collective agreements and therefore generally receive nothing in terms of holiday pay”.
Holiday pay doubled
According to WSI, however, during times of high inflation, many districts have increased their mutually agreed vacation pay. This applies especially to those sectors that set it as a percentage of collective wages.In the current year, this includes major construction, steel, retail, printing, building cleaning, wood and plastic processing, paper processing, and insurance
Therefore, the increase in holiday pay follows the increase in general tariffs, mainly between 1.6% and 2.5%. The biggest increases in holiday wages were in the steel industry, up 6.5 percent, and in building cleaning, up 8.7 percent. The amount of collectively agreed vacation pay varies by industry: employees in the middle wage group will receive between 180 and 2,686 euros this year.
The background for these figures is a survey by the “Lohnspiegel.de” portal managed by WSI. Information on 59,215 employees who participated in continuous online surveys was assessed between May 2022 and April 2023. “The survey is not representative, but due to the large number of cases, it allows for a more detailed understanding of the world of work,” the institute explained. Public sector employees were not counted because the tariffs imposed since 2005 Since the reform, their holiday and Christmas bonuses have been combined into a single annual bonus.