Annual leave in Malta 2026: how much your team is really owed

Get leave wrong and it costs you twice. Grant too little and you are in breach, with back-pay and a sour relationship to repair. Grant too much and you are paying for time your business never agreed to give. Both mistakes start in the same place: a total that was never worked out properly for the year.

Malta’s annual leave rules are not complicated. But two features trip up owners used to a simpler “so many days off” model. This article covers both. Then it shows how to work out the figure for anyone who does not work a standard full year.

Malta counts leave in hours, not days

The first surprise for many employers is that statutory leave in Malta is measured in hours, not days. Full-time annual leave is set as a number of hours. The day count follows only when someone works a standard eight-hour day.

That distinction matters the moment you employ anyone on shifts. A person on ten-hour shifts uses more of their hour entitlement per day off than someone on eight. Track leave in days for a shift worker and the balance drifts wrong within a month. Track it in hours and it stays correct, whatever the pattern.

The base entitlement, and the part people miss

Full-time statutory leave starts from a base figure in hours for the year. On top of that base, Malta adds leave for public holidays that fall on a weekend. When a public holiday lands on a Saturday or Sunday, the entitlement gains a day in lieu. That day is added as hours to the annual total.

This is the part most often missed, because the number changes every year. The count of public holidays that fall on a weekend differs from one year to the next. So the total entitlement moves with the calendar, and an employer who reuses last year’s figure is out by exactly those hours.

For 2026, three public holidays fall on a weekend — 7 June, 15 August, and 13 December. That takes the 192-hour base to 216 hours of full-time leave. For someone on an eight-hour day, that is 27 days. The weekend count changes each year, so this figure is specific to 2026.

Working out pro-rata

Few teams are all full-time, all year. Part-timers, mid-year starters, and leavers each need their entitlement scaled. The method is the same in every case. Take the full-time hours for the year, and apply the proportion the person actually works.

• A part-timer. Someone contracted for half a full-time week gets half the annual hours. At a 216-hour entitlement, that is 108 hours for the year.
• A mid-year starter. Someone who joins a third of the way through the year gets the remaining two-thirds. Two-thirds of 216 is 144 hours for their first, partial year.
• A leaver. The same logic runs in reverse. Someone leaving a quarter of the way through the year has accrued a quarter of the entitlement. Any leave taken above that is an overpayment to reconcile in the final pay.

Round in the employee’s favour where a calculation lands between hours. Keep the working, so you can always explain a balance.

When the hours themselves vary

Some staff have no fixed weekly hours at all. For them, entitlement follows the average hours actually worked. Take that average over a reference period, not a single week. Averaging over the past quarter smooths out busy and quiet weeks and gives a fair figure to pro-rate from. A single peak week is never the right basis.

Carry-over and payment in lieu

Two rules close the year. Untaken leave generally carries into the next year within agreed limits, rather than simply lapsing. And leave can be paid in lieu only on termination — never as a way to buy back time off during employment. Handling either loosely is how a balance quietly becomes wrong by year-end.

Where the errors actually come from

None of this is difficult in isolation. It becomes error-prone because it is per-person and in hours, and it shifts with every starter and leaver. A leave system holds each person’s contracted hours, applies the current year’s entitlement, and books time against a live balance. That removes the manual arithmetic that quietly drifts, and turns a balance you hope is right into one you can stand behind.

If leave tracking eats your team’s admin, bitKode Leave keeps every balance in hours, pro-rated and current. An answer about who is owed what takes a glance, not a spreadsheet.