Buying and selling vacation days
What if the vacation week you never take could become cash, and the extra week you keep dreaming about could simply be bought? Here is the math behind buying and selling vacation days, and what we learned designing it with one of our customers.
What if the vacation week you never take could become cash, and the extra week you keep dreaming about could simply be bought? Here is the math behind buying and selling vacation days, and what we learned designing it with one of our customers.
Every HR leader has fielded these questions. The parent of small children asks if there is any way to get a few more days next summer. The colleague planning a wedding wonders whether an extra week could go toward the honeymoon they keep postponing. And the one whose vacation balance quietly expires every year asks why those days cannot become something else instead. They are all really asking the same thing: can my time off flex the way my life does?
Most companies answer with policy documents. We think the better answer is a slider.
Adjust your days
A vacation day is worth your daily salary plus semestertillägg. Sell days for cash to your balance, or buy days and pay via salary.
You keep your 30 standard days
Drag the slider to sell or buy days.
The idea: a band around your standard
The design we keep coming back to is simple. Take the company's standard vacation entitlement, say 30 days, and open a band around it. Five days down, five days up.
- Selling days means choosing fewer than your standard. Each sold day becomes a one-time cash payout.
- Buying days means choosing more than your standard. Each bought day is a one-time salary deduction in the month you buy, and your ongoing monthly salary is untouched.
- Doing nothing keeps your standard days. The default is always safe.
The floor is not a design choice, it is law: semesterlagen guarantees every employee 25 days of vacation, so the band can never dip below that no matter how the company configures it. The ceiling is up to you.
A vacation day is not the same as time off
There are two different things a company can offer here, and they are not priced the same way.
Buying time off is the simple one. You are buying extra leave and paying for it out of salary, so a day costs what a day of your salary costs. Nothing else attaches to it.
Buying and selling vacation days touches a statutory right, and that changes the arithmetic twice over. Semesterlagen guarantees 25 days, so nobody can sell below that floor however the company configures the band. And every paid vacation day in Sweden carries a semestertillägg, a supplement paid on top of your ordinary salary when you take the day. Sell a day and you give up its supplement, so the payout has to include it. Buy a day and you gain one, so the price includes it too.
Under semesterlagen that supplement is 0.43 % of the monthly salary per day. Most collective agreements are more generous, commonly landing between 0.8 % and 1.45 %, so the exact rate comes out of your own agreement rather than from a single national number.
What a day is worth
The core of the feature is a single question: what is one vacation day worth in kronor? For someone earning 45 000 kr a month, on semesterlagen's 0.43 %, it is 1 479 kr of pay plus 194 kr of semestertillägg: 1 673 kr. The chart below runs that across the whole band, so you can read the trade in either direction at a glance: every day you sell below your standard 30 pays cash into your balance, every day you buy above it costs a one-time deduction, and the two mirror each other around the same per-day rate.
1 673 kr per vacation day, at 45 000 kr a month.
1 479 kr of pay plus 194 kr in semestertillägg, the 0.43 % semesterlagen adds to every paid vacation day.
vacation days chosen · 30 is your standard
That symmetry comes with one honest caveat: both halves of the number are policy, not physics. The pay half depends on the basis you pick, since a day can be valued against calendar days, against working days, or against the semesterdagsvärde in a collective agreement. The supplement half moves too, and a company on a 0.8 % agreement would price the same day at 1 839 kr rather than 1 673 kr. Both are decisions each company makes once, visibly, rather than formulas employees have to reverse-engineer from their payslip.
The rules that keep it honest
A vacation exchange only builds trust if the edge cases are settled before anyone touches the slider. These are the guardrails we consider non-negotiable:
- The statutory floor holds. 25 days is the legal minimum in Sweden. The slider simply cannot go below it.
- You cannot sell days you have already taken. Sold days must come out of the unused balance.
- The company sets the window. Some keep the choice open all year, others open it once or a handful of times. Whatever the shape, it locks before payroll runs, so the numbers rest on decisions rather than moving targets.
- The money is transparent. A sold day shows up as one visible payout; a bought day as one visible deduction. No slow-drip surprises across twelve payslips.
And to be equally honest about the money: a sold day paid out in cash is salary. It is taxed as salary and carries employer social fees like salary. The design goal is not to make time off tax-clever, it is to make it flexible without making anyone's payslip confusing.
Why companies are asking for this
When we ran the numbers on what employees across generations actually value, extra time off was the quiet constant: it never topped the list, and it never left it.
That stability is the argument. A gym card serves some of your people. Time flexes for all of them, in both directions: the senior specialist who would rather have a 33-day summer than another gadget budget, and the recent graduate who wants the cash more than the fifth week. Same benefit, opposite choices, both feel seen. It is the purest version of the argument we made in our worked example on flexible benefits: the money is already in the package, the win is letting people shape it.
Where this stands today
We designed and prototyped this together with one of our customers, a company whose employees asked for exactly this flexibility, and the design in the illustration above is the one their employees tried. Turning a prototype into payroll-grade reality means nailing the valuation basis, the election windows, and the year-end edge cases together with each company's payroll setup, and that is design work we would rather do in the open than hide behind a feature toggle.
If your company has been circling the same questions, we would genuinely like to compare notes.
The short version
- A band around the standard entitlement, for example 25 to 35 days around 30. Sell below, buy above, keep by default.
- Buying plain time off is priced off salary alone. Buying and selling vacation days touches a statutory right, so both the 25-day floor and the semestertillägg apply.
- A vacation day is a daily salary plus semestertillägg: at 45 000 kr a month that is 1 673 kr, so selling 3 days pays about 5 019 kr and buying 2 days costs about 3 346 kr, once.
- Semesterlagen's 25-day minimum is a hard floor. Sold days are taxed as the salary they are.
- Extra time off is the rare benefit roughly one in three employees value in every generation.
- We prototyped this with one of our customers; the payroll details are design decisions made per company.
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