Additional pay and deductions – effective from 1 October 2023

The amendment introduces a duty to pay employees all additional pay entitlements. This seeks to close the gap between regular employment and DPP agreements. Additional pay applies to weekend, public holiday and night work.

Conversely, employers will now be able to make deductions from remuneration under DPP and DPČ agreements. These deductions mainly concern enforcement proceedings – amounts to satisfy creditors can now also be deducted from agreement workers’ remuneration, provided the employee’s subsistence minimum is preserved, of course. 🙂

Holiday entitlement – effective from 1 January 2024

At present, only regular employees are legally entitled to holiday. The amendment is intended to extend holiday entitlement to agreement workers working under DPP and DPČ agreements.

To qualify for holiday, an agreement worker must meet both conditions:

  • an agreement lasting at least 4 weeks
  • more than 80 hours worked per year

The calculation is based on a notional 20-hour working week, regardless of how many hours the employee actually works each week. To illustrate the calculation, let us take a temporary worker who worked 200 hours during the year.

Using a 20-hour working week, this converts to a total of 10 weeks worked (200 hours / notional 20 hours per week). We then simply insert the figures into the formula:

Always round up to the next whole hour.

To calculate total holiday pay (or payment in lieu), multiply the employee’s average hourly earnings by their holiday entitlement in hours. Average earnings usually correspond to the hourly wage. I understand this may seem complicated, but in reality it is nothing that payroll software and a payroll accountant cannot handle. 🙂

For DPP agreements: holiday taken does not count towards the limit of 300 hours worked per year. For DPČ agreements, holiday taken counts towards the limit of 20 hours worked per week. It is important to mention that this limit is assessed as an average over the whole year, or the whole agreement period if shorter than a year. If your DPČ employee works an average of 10 hours a week and takes their entire holiday entitlement at once at the year-end (40 hours), they still fit within the limit (10 hours * 52 weeks + 40 holiday hours = 560 hours / 52 weeks = 10.77 hours per week).

Other holiday rules are to become uniform, regardless of the type of contract under which the employee works. However, I expect that in practice employers will handle agreement workers’ holiday by paying compensation for unused holiday in one lump sum after the agreement ends. This procedure is consistent with the law.

Moving from a DPP agreement to regular employment

If an agreement worker has worked for an employer for at least 180 days during the past year, they may ask the employer in writing to increase their employment commitment to a regular employment relationship. The employer then has one month to respond in writing and may accept or refuse.

This change aims to prevent employees being artificially kept on agreements when they want regular employment.

Changes to termination of DPP and DPČ agreements

The 15-day notice period for either party to terminate an agreement without giving a reason remains in place. If an employee believes they were dismissed for asserting their rights, they can ask you as the employer in writing within 1 month to explain the dismissal. You must then give them the reason in writing.

Although most of these changes have already been approved, further important changes are being prepared, primarily concerning social and health insurance contributions on DPP and DPČ agreements. I have a bit of a feeling that the state wants to make these agreements so unpleasant that we simply stop using them …

I will keep you informed about all new changes and when they take effect. If you are unsure, do not hesitate to get in touch and we can look at it together. 🙂