New vacation engine - Sweden and Norway

A new foundation for vacation management

Vacation management is one of the most compliance-sensitive areas in HR — and one of the hardest to get right across different countries. Rules differ, company policies vary, and the margin for error is small.

The new vacation engine is now live for eight countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Germany. Each country comes with its own template built on local rules, with configurable options on top.

This article covers the changes for Sweden and Norway specifically, plus the improvements that apply to all customers.

The new vacation engine has been rebuilt from the ground up to handle this complexity properly. It brings country-specific logic, clearer configuration, and accurate calculations — so your HR team spends less time correcting mistakes and more time on things that matter.

This article covers everything that changes for customers in Sweden and Norway.

What changes for all customers

These improvements apply regardless of country.

Ready-made country templates. Instead of building policies from scratch, you now start from a template that follows your country's rules out of the box. Each template comes with configurable options so you can adapt it to your company's setup without needing to understand the underlying logic.

Policy configuration in plain language. Every setting now explains what it actually does in practice. You see the impact of a choice before you make it — no more guessing what a field means.

A new balance view. The balance overview has been redesigned to be clearer and more actionable — broken down by pool, earning year, and entitlement type, for both HR and employees.

Full audit trail. Every action is logged — adjustments, leave requests, policy changes, balance edits. Who did it, when, and why. Nothing disappears.

Debt visibility at employee level. If an employee has outstanding advance vacation days, the debt is visible directly on their profile. No manual tracking needed.

No accrual during employment gaps. The engine automatically stops accrual when employment ends or a gap is detected. This is handled without any manual intervention.

Legacy policy support. Existing policies with legacy configuration remain available. You don't have to migrate everything at once.

Sweden

Sweden has some of the most complex vacation rules in the Nordics — a qualifying year separate from the spending year, paid and unpaid days as distinct concepts, and specific rules for how carried days are tracked. The new engine handles all of this correctly.

Advanced vacation (förskottssemester). HR can now grant vacation days before they are earned. Each grant is tracked independently with a 5-year recovery window, as required by §29a Semesterlagen. If an employee leaves before the window closes, any outstanding advance days are visible as a debt on their profile. There is no cap on how many advance days can be granted.

Configurable employment rate behaviour. Two proration models are now available. Rate-based: an employee at 50% gets 50% of the day entitlement. Schedule-based: an employee at 50% who works every day gets the full entitlement, since it is based on actual working days rather than the rate percentage. Companies choose the model that fits their setup. This fixes a longstanding issue where part-time workers were penalised regardless of how they actually worked.

Year-after availability (intjänandeår). Days earned in a qualifying year are now correctly made available in the following year, as Semesterlagen requires. The previous system did not handle this correctly.

Full flexibility on paid and unpaid pools. Paid and unpaid vacation have always been tracked separately. The new engine gives HR full flexibility to adjust each pool independently, with a complete audit trail on every change.

Saved days tracked by earning year. The engine tracks carried vacation days by the year they were earned, with deductions applied oldest-first. This gives employees and HR full visibility on expiry, and makes it possible to apply different carry-over rules per cohort — which is essential for countries like the Netherlands, the UK, and Denmark where rules vary by year.

Norway

Age entitlement at 60 — automatic. Employees receive their extra vacation days automatically in the year they turn 60, as the Norwegian Holiday Act requires. The engine detects the birthday and grants the correct amount: +6 days for a 6-day work week, +5 days for a 5-day work week. No HR action needed. The balance shows a clear notation so employees understand where the extra days come from.

Configurable deduction mode. Companies can now choose how vacation days are deducted: working days only (the current model), or a 6-day week model where Saturdays are counted — similar to the Finnish approach. The choice is made at policy level.

Latecomers cap. For employees who join part-way through the year, a configurable cap on vacation days is now available as an optional parameter. Companies can define their own cap rules rather than applying a fixed default.

Configurable employment rate behaviour. The same two proration models available in Sweden apply here: rate-based or schedule-based, chosen at policy level.

If you have questions about how a specific feature applies to your setup, reach out to your contact at Simployer.