Two and a half days a month

Salomé is hired in March by Boulangerie Serret, on 2 000 € gross a month. In July she asks for four weeks of leave. Her employer replies that she is entitled only to what she has accrued, and he is right — but his arithmetic is wrong. Before you read: how many days accrue each month, and over what period are they counted?

Two and a half days, thirty at most

Article L3141-3 of the labour code runs to two sentences. The employee is entitled to leave of two and a half working days per month of actual work with the same employer. The total leave that may be claimed may not exceed thirty working days.

The arithmetic is therefore simple and the ceiling consistent: twelve months of actual work produce thirty working days, exactly the maximum. A full year with the same employer opens the five weeks everyone talks about.

Three details of the text matter as much as the figure. The days counted are the six-day kind, not the five-day kind. The month must be one of actual work. And accrual runs with the same employer, which ties it to a given employment relationship.

The distinction between the two ways of counting days produces the most misunderstanding. A six-day count covers every day of the week bar one, a five-day count covers the working week: thirty of the former and twenty-five of the latter describe the same five weeks.

A reference period, set absent an agreement

Leave does not accrue over the calendar year but over what is called the reference period, and the code first leaves collective bargaining to fix it. Article R3141-4 comes in only absent an agreement.

It then provides: absent the agreement provided for in article L3141-10, the starting point of the period taken into account for computing leave entitlement is set at 1 June each year.

The text reserves one special case. In occupations where the employer must join a holiday fund, the starting point of the reference year is set at 1 April. Construction and public works classically fall under it.

The offset explains something many employees live through without naming it: leave taken in summer comes from entitlements accrued since 1 June of the previous year, not since 1 January.

The order of the texts is worth noting in passing. The code first entrusts the fixing of that period to a company, establishment or sector agreement; the 1 June date comes in only in its absence. It is a default rule, not a principle.

A company covered by an agreement on the point will therefore not find its answer in article R3141-4. That is the reflex to keep throughout this course: several of its rules give way to an agreement, and you check which applies before applying the default text.

What accrual does not settle

The article fixes an entitlement; it does not organise the taking of leave. Knowing how many days an employee has accrued says nothing about when they may be booked, nor what fraction must be taken in one block: that is the next module's subject.

Nor does the text say anything about what is paid during the leave. The paid-leave allowance follows its own rules, and its computation does not flow mechanically from current pay, as the third module shows.

Finally, accrual presupposes actual work, but the code treats a number of periods that are not actual work as if they were. It is through that mechanism of assimilation that sick leave has, since 2024, been able to generate entitlement.