How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Germany?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Germany takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,653 of them, so the post needs 5.3 employees, which is 6 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 6 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Germany has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 7 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 20 days of statutory paid leave, 14.6 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 44.6 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 216.4 working days per employee, and at a 38.2-hour week that is 7.64 hours a day, so 1,653 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,653 available hours is a relief factor of 5.3, so the post needs 6 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −7 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −20 |
| Average sickness absence | −14.6 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 216.4 |
| At 7.64 hours a day | 1,653 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Germany, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Germany that gives 5.5 against a derived answer of 5.3, so the shortcut is high by 3.6 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 3.6%.
From Germany's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 5.3 | 6 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.79 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.53 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.89 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
20 days is the statutory floor in Germany, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 20 daysstatutory floor | 5.3 | 6 |
| 25 days | 5.43 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.51 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.56 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.64 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
The law states weeks indirectly, via working days on a six-day basis: Section 3(1) BUrlG sets a minimum of 24 Werktage a year, and Section 3(2) defines Werktage as all calendar days that are not Sundays or public holidays. That is a six-day week, so 24 / 6 x 5 = 20 working days on a five-day week (four weeks either way). Public holidays are excluded by the definition itself, so the 20 days sit on top of public holidays and are never absorbed by them.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 38.2-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Germany, not by the 48-hour statutory figure. That larger number is a legal ceiling on how much someone may be asked to work, not a description of what a full-time employee is contracted for, and using it as capacity would understate the headcount a post needs.
The holiday count is a floor
Most public holidays in Germany are set regionally rather than nationally, so this page counts only the 7 days observed across the whole country. A specific region will observe more, which pushes the relief factor up. The public holiday calendar for Germany lists the regional days.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Germany
Germany's working time law sets no weekly cap directly. Section 3 ArbZG caps the werktaeglich (per working day) time at 8 hours, and Werktage run Monday to Saturday, so the statutory maximum normal week is 6 x 8 = 48 hours. It can rise to 10 hours a day (60 hours a week) provided the average falls back to 8 hours a day over 24 weeks or 6 calendar months. 48 hours a week averaged is also the hard ceiling that collective-agreement derogations under Section 7(8) ArbZG cannot exceed. Treat 48 as a legal ceiling, not as capacity: never use it as hours per FTE in a coverage calculation.
collectiveWeeklyHours 38.2 is the IAB Arbeitszeitrechnung component "tarifliche/betriebsuebliche Wochenarbeitszeit der Vollzeitbeschaeftigten" for 2025 (38.19 in the published table, 38.2 rounded). It is the agreed or customary normal full-time week across the whole economy, excluding overtime, built on the Destatis Tarifindex, and it is the same dataset Destatis uses for its official sickness indicator. Three cross-checks that a planner should know: the purely collectively agreed average from the WSI Tarifarchiv is 37.8 hours for 2024 (37.6 West, 38.6 East), but only 49 percent of employees work in tariff-bound establishments (Destatis, 2025), and untariffed contracts are commonly 40 hours; Destatis's own earnings survey reports 39.1 paid hours a week for full-time employees in April 2025, though "paid" includes paid overtime so it overstates the contracted week. If the workforce being modelled is tariff-bound, use 37.8; if it is not, 40 is the realistic contract.
Leave is where this data is usually got wrong. The 20 days is a floor almost nobody actually works to: the Bundestag research service notes that most collective agreements set 30 days, and 30 is the common private-sector contract too. Do not let a user read 20 as "typical". Also note that 20 excludes public holidays, of which nine are observed in every Land and more in some (Bavaria has the most), and those are set by state law rather than federal law apart from 3 October.
Sickness 14.6 is working days (not calendar days) per employee (Arbeitnehmer, so employees only, not the self-employed) for 2025, from the IAB Arbeitszeitrechnung as published by Destatis. Two caveats. First, Destatis flags that sick notes are generally only issued from the third day of incapacity, so short absences are under-recorded and the true figure is somewhat higher. Second, the series is not comparable across 2022: the electronic sick note (eAU) introduced on 1 January 2022 captured short absences that were previously missed, and the average jumped by about 3.4 days (11.2 in 2021 to 14.8 in 2022). Recent years: 15.2 (2023), 14.8 (2024), 14.6 (2025). Health-insurer reports (AOK, DAK, TK) publish much higher numbers, often above 20 days, because they count calendar days and cover different member populations. Do not mix those with this figure.
Last point for anyone summing these: 14.6 sick days and 20 to 30 leave days are both already expressed in working days on a five-day week, so they can be subtracted from the same annual working-day base (roughly 249 potential working days in 2025 per the IAB table) without unit conversion.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory maximum working time: 8 hours per Werktag, extendable to 10 hours if the 8-hour average holds over 24 weeks or 6 months. Six Werktage (Mon-Sat) give the 48-hour week.
48 hours a week is the binding average ceiling under ArbZG, including for collective-agreement derogations; up to ten hours may be worked across the six Werktage with compensation.
Statutory minimum paid annual leave: 24 Werktage a year; Werktage are all calendar days that are not Sundays or public holidays.
Conversion table: 6-day week 24 days, 5-day week 20 days, 4-day week 16 days. Four weeks a year regardless of days worked. Most collective agreements set 30 days.
Wochenarbeitszeit Vollzeit 38.19 hours and Krankenstand 14.59 Arbeitstage for 2025 (component table, Stand February 2026); potential working days 249.1.
Definition of the component: "Die tarifliche/betriebsuebliche Wochenarbeitszeit der Vollzeitbeschaeftigten lag im Jahr 2023 bei 38,2 Stunden (1991: 39,1 Stunden)", section 3.4.
Employees were on sick leave an average of 14.6 working days in 2025; 5.9 percent absent on average. Source given as IAB-Arbeitszeitrechnung. Notes that sick notes are generally only issued from three days of incapacity.
Corroboration for the practical full-time week: bezahlte Wochenarbeitszeit of full-time employees 39.1 hours (all sectors, April 2025). Paid hours include paid overtime.
Corroboration for the collectively agreed week: tarifvertragliche woechentliche Arbeitszeit 37.8 hours in 2024 (West 37.6, East 38.6), series 1990 to 2024, Stand 31.12.2024.
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Germany?
- 6 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Germany is actually available for about 1,653 of them once 44.6 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 5.3, which rounds up to 6 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Germany that is 8,766 divided by 1,653, or 5.3. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Germany?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.4 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.5, against a derived answer of 5.3. That is 3.6 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Germany actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Germany?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 20 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
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