Holiday Planning 2026: From Leave Request to Watertight Roster

In January, summer feels far away. In May, seven requests for the same week suddenly land on your desk, all from people you badly need that week. Holiday planning is therefore not an administrative afterthought: it is a scheduling exercise you are best off starting before the season begins.

In this article: which Belgian rules set the boundaries of your plan, how to assess clashing requests objectively, and how to move from scattered emails to a watertight roster.

Leave is a staffing problem, not a calendar problem

Approving a leave request always means two things at once: granting a right and punching a hole in your roster. Look only at the first and you will be standing in July with a team that is far too thin. Look only at the second and you end up in conflict with holiday legislation.

The core of a good approach is therefore simple: first define your minimum staffing level per day and per role, then assess requests against that figure. Not the other way round.

An example from cleaning: a team of 24 cleaners covers 11 office sites over the summer. Seven sites run at half capacity because of the client's collective closure, four remain fully open. The real question is not "how many people are on leave?" but "do we have at least two certified team leaders on every single day, plus enough people with badge access for site A?". Those are two very different calculations.

The legal rules that set the boundaries of your plan

Before you approve anything, it helps to know the fixed frameworks. For a full-time employee in a five-day week, the entitlement is four weeks of annual holiday, or 20 days, built up during the holiday qualifying year (the year before).

The key rules when granting leave:

• Holiday is fixed by mutual agreement. You cannot impose leave unilaterally, and the employee cannot take it unilaterally either. Only in the case of a collective closure are the dates set in advance.
• Take it within the calendar year. Holiday must be taken between 1 January and 31 December of the holiday year; carrying days over to the following year is in principle not allowed. Since 2024 there is an exception for days the employee could not take due to illness or accident.
• At least one uninterrupted week. Every employee is entitled to one continuous week of holiday.
• Two consecutive weeks between 1 May and 31 October if the employee requests it. For employees who are under 18 on 31 December of the holiday qualifying year, it is three weeks.
• Priority for employees with school-age children when scheduling during school holidays. That is not an automatic right to a specific week, but it is a factor you must weigh up.
• Half days are the exception, not the rule; splitting leave is only possible in the cases the law provides for.

More background on the types of holiday and holiday pay can be found on the social security portal.

Collective closure or individual leave?

In industry and at many production companies, a collective closure is the logical choice: shutting down the line is more efficient than running three weeks with half-staffed shifts. In care, retail and hospitality that is not an option, so you work entirely with individual leave.

If you opt for a collective closure, keep the procedure in mind:

1. The dates are set by the joint committee, the works council, or — in the absence of both — by agreement with all employees.
2. The closure period must be included in the work rules (arbeidsreglement), following the relevant amendment procedure.
3. Employees who have not built up sufficient holiday entitlement (school leavers, for example, or people who recently changed status) may be able to fall back on temporary unemployment or on supplementary holiday for those days. The NEO (RVA) describes that situation in detail.

A half-hearted compromise — "we're basically closed, but anyone who wants to come in can work" — gives you the worst of both worlds: no clarity in the work rules and no reliable roster.

Clashing requests: decide on criteria, not by email

The moment holiday planning goes wrong is almost always the same: two people ask for the same week, and the decision is made on the basis of who emailed first or who pushed hardest. That feels arbitrary, and it often is.

So set out your order of criteria in advance and communicate it:

• Staffing first. If approval breaks the minimum staffing level, the answer is no — regardless of who asked.
• Statutory priority. School-age children, employees under 18, and the right to two consecutive weeks during the summer period.
• Rotation. Whoever got the construction holiday weeks last year goes to the back of the queue this year. Write it down, because nobody remembers.
• Date of request, only as a tiebreaker.

Also communicate a deadline: for example, all summer requests in by 15 March, decision by 31 March. That way you can weigh up requests as a package instead of one by one. Bear in mind, too, that you are in principle expected to announce the date of the main holiday well in advance — six weeks is the guideline that recurs in the implementing rules. A March deadline is therefore not a luxury.

Why Excel breaks down here

A holiday calendar in a spreadsheet works as long as you have twelve people and one site. After that, three things go wrong:

• The balances stop adding up. Part-timers, people who joined during the year, supplementary (European) holiday, extra sectoral days: tracking that manually per person is error-prone.
• The roster and the calendar live separately. Someone is approved for leave but stays in the work schedule. The result: a colleague steps in, works overtime, and your wage cost rises without anyone consciously deciding it should.
• Nobody spots the gaps in time. A spreadsheet shows who is absent, not whether your staffing is still workable.

The answer is not more columns, but a single source: leave requests that land straight in the schedule, so an approved day immediately shows up as understaffing. That way you can see at the point of approval whether you need a replacement — not three days beforehand. In Forganiser, leave, work schedules and staff records are linked, so the approval and its impact on staffing become visible in the same movement.

The replacement question: solve it before June

As soon as you know where the gaps fall, you still have time to fill them properly. That can be with students, with flexi-jobbers or other flexible contracts, or with temp agency staff. Each of those choices comes with its own administrative tail: a correct Dimona, a contract signed on time, and, in case of changes, the rules on amending the work schedule.

Sort it out in June and you choose from a wide pool. Sort it out during the week itself and you pay overtime. The same principle applies to public holidays, by the way — see scheduling public holidays in care without an overtime peak.

Checklist for your holiday plan

• Minimum staffing set per day, per site and per role
• Collective closure correctly included in the work rules
• Deadline for summer requests communicated
• Criteria for clashing requests written down
• Balances per employee up to date, including part-timers and new starters
• Approved leave automatically visible in the roster
• Replacements (students, flexi-jobbers, temp staff) arranged with Dimona and contract in order

Holiday planning does not get calmer by planning harder in June. It gets calmer by asking the right questions in March.