Working rights across Europe
Entitlement is half the story. The other half is who pays.
Introduction
“Which country has the best worker rights?” has no single statistical answer.
A worker may have a long entitlement paid at a low rate, or a short one replacing most of their pay. The cost may fall on the employer, a social insurance fund, general taxation or the worker. Any league table that reports duration alone is comparing things that are not alike.
UK statutory entitlements, 2026/27
Annual leave
Paid by: EmployerEntitlement
5.6 weeks — usually 28 days for someone working five days a week
Payment
Normal holiday pay
Who really bears it: Employer labour cost. Not benefit expenditure, and never to be added to cash benefit totals.
Statutory Sick Pay
Paid by: EmployerEntitlement
Up to 28 weeks; payable from the first day of eligible absence from 6 April 2026
Payment
The lower of 80% of average weekly earnings or £123.25 a week
Who really bears it: Normally employer-funded, so it does not appear in ordinary benefit spending.
Maternity leave and pay
Paid by: MixedEntitlement
Up to 52 weeks leave; Statutory Maternity Pay for up to 39 weeks
Payment
90% of average weekly earnings for 6 weeks, then 33 weeks at the lower of £194.32 or 90% of earnings
Who really bears it: Employers administer payment, but HMRC generally reimburses 92%, and more than 100% for qualifying small employers under Small Employers’ Relief. The exact recovery rate is set annually — check GOV.UK for the current figure.
Paternity leave and pay
Paid by: MixedEntitlement
Up to 2 weeks
Payment
The lower of £194.32 or 90% of average weekly earnings
Who really bears it: Same statutory-payment recovery framework as maternity pay.
Maternity Allowance
Paid by: General taxationEntitlement
Up to 39 weeks for people who do not qualify for SMP
Payment
Up to £194.32 a week, or 90% of earnings if lower
Who really bears it: Public expenditure — this one genuinely is a benefit.
Statutory Sick Pay became payable from the first day of eligible absence on 6 April 2026. Absences beginning before that date follow the previous rules, so any comparison across that boundary needs the effective date attached.
The holiday comparison trap
EU law sets a minimum of four weeks of paid annual leave. Eurofound found 19 of 28 countries studied had a 20-day statutory minimum in 2024; Austria, Denmark, France, Sweden had 25, Portugal and Spain had 22, and Luxembourg had 26.
Here is the trap. The UK’s 5.6 weeks is a total that employers may satisfy partly with bank holidays. A European figure of 20 or 25 days is usually statutory leave BEFORE public holidays are added. Putting “UK 28” next to “Spain 22” without saying so makes Britain look more generous than a like-for-like comparison would.
Our rule. Never publish a single combined total until statutory leave, public holidays, collectively agreed norms and the treatment of holidays falling at weekends all use the same reference year and the same rules. Until this site can publish statutory leave, public holidays and collectively agreed norms for every country on the same basis, it will not publish a holiday league table. A table that looks authoritative and compares different things is worse than no table.
What a sick pay comparison has to record
“Country X pays 70% of your salary when you are sick” is not enough information to compare anything. Eight fields decide what that actually means:
Waiting days
70% of pay after three unpaid days is not the same as 70% from day one.
Who pays first
Employer-funded and social-insurance systems put the cost in different places.
Replacement rate
A percentage of what — gross pay, net pay, an insured wage, or a capped reference wage?
Floor and cap
Headline percentages overstate support for high earners and understate minimum guarantees.
Maximum duration
Short-term employer sick pay may hand over to a sickness or disability system.
Eligibility test
A right on paper can exclude recent starters and low earners.
Tax treatment
Net replacement can differ sharply from the gross statutory rate.
Collective agreements
Statutory minimums do not describe what many employees actually receive.
When this site publishes a country comparison it will be built from a versioned extraction of the MISSOC, comparative social protection tables, with every row linked to its country table — not assembled from secondary summaries.
Parental leave: duration is not generosity
The honest measure is full-rate equivalent weeks — paid weeks multiplied by the average payment rate relative to normal earnings. A year of leave at a low flat rate is not a year of pay.
2.4 weeks
OECD average paternity leave
12.7 weeks
Average total paid leave reserved for fathers
8.1 weeks
The same entitlement at full pay
The gap between 12.7 weeks and 8.1 full-rate-equivalent weeks is the whole point: a third of the headline entitlement disappears once payment rates are counted. Spain provided 16 weeks under the same reference system. These are the entitlements in force in April 2024 under the OECD’s reference systems. They should not be presented as 2026 law without a fresh check.
There is no single “cost of worker rights”
There is no defensible single figure for “the cost of worker benefits”. Annual leave is an employer labour cost; UK sick pay is mostly employer-funded; statutory maternity and paternity pay are employer-administered but largely reimbursed by HMRC; Maternity Allowance is public spending. Adding employer-paid holiday to cash benefit expenditure produces a number that describes nothing.
Claim checks
“UK workers get 28 days holiday plus bank holidays”
MisleadingWhat is known: The statutory entitlement is 5.6 weeks — 28 days for someone working five days a week. Employers are allowed to count bank holidays within that 28 days.
What is not known: What any individual contract provides. Many employers do give leave on top of bank holidays, but the law does not require it.
“Employers pay UK maternity pay, so it costs the taxpayer nothing”
IncorrectWhat is known: Employers administer Statutory Maternity Pay, but HMRC generally reimburses 92% of it, and more than 100% for qualifying small employers under Small Employers' Relief. Maternity Allowance is funded entirely from public spending.
“Country X offers a year of maternity pay”
Missing contextWhat is known: Such claims usually combine maternity and parental leave, paid and unpaid periods, and transferable and reserved entitlements.
What is not known: The payment rate. A year of leave at a low capped flat rate replaces far less income than a shorter, well-paid entitlement.
What would change this verdict: Stating full-rate equivalent weeks alongside duration.
Related: jobs and pay, the benefits system and the State Pension.