Collective bargaining agreements change the rules: holidays will be considered effective vacation days in these cases.

The majority of workers are preparing to take their vacations during the next two months, July and August, dates when there are various public holidays throughout Spain that can affect the preparation of employees' vacation schedules. They always have a recurring question: are those days considered vacation days or are they excluded from the calculation?

The Workers' Statute devotes its entire Article 38 ( you can consult it at this link ) to regulating employee vacations and states that under no circumstances may these vacations be less than thirty calendar days . This, applied to working days, excluding weekends, results in a minimum annual vacation of 22 working days .

In any case, the text assigns to the collective bargaining agreements or contracts signed between employers and employees the responsibility of determining how employees' vacations are structured : whether with calendar days or with work days.

This has been confirmed by the USO (Union Sindical Obrera) union on its TikTok account, where it has established the difference between whether or not holidays are counted as vacation days.

In the video, the union confirms that " the key is to review what your collective bargaining agreement says " and breaks down two possibilities:

• If the vacation days are calendar days, holidays will fall within the vacation period, as will weekends.
• If the vacation days are working days, then the holidays will not count as vacation days.

However, the union urges workers to review their collective bargaining agreements because they can "clearly explain how holidays are counted as vacation time."

Applied to the month of July, the first of the two main summer vacation months, and taking into account that Friday, July 25th, is a holiday throughout Spain due to the feast of St. James the Apostle, workers would have to organize themselves as follows:

• If you have 30 calendar days and want a full month of vacation, you should start from the 2nd to the 31st, or, failing that, from the 1st to the 30th. In both situations, the 25th is an additional vacation day.
• If they have 22 calendar days, to take the full month of July, they would only need 21 days, since the holiday wouldn't count toward their vacation days. Thus, the employee would "earn" one day.