How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in the Netherlands?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in the Netherlands takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,621 of them, so the post needs 5.41 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
The Netherlands has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 6 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 20 days of statutory paid leave, 14.1 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 43.1 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 217.9 working days per employee, and at a 37.2-hour week that is 7.44 hours a day, so 1,621 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,621 available hours is a relief factor of 5.41, so the post needs 6 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −6 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −20 |
| Average sickness absence | −14.1 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 217.9 |
| At 7.44 hours a day | 1,621 hours |
the Netherlands gives no legal right to paid time off on public holidays. Time off is near-universal in practice, so the 6 weekday holidays are still deducted, but that is a reading of custom rather than of law.
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 the Netherlands that gives 5.64 against a derived answer of 5.41, so the shortcut is high by 4.4 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 4.4%.
From the Netherlands'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 | 5.41 | 6 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.86 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.6 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.93 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
20 days is the statutory floor in the Netherlands, 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 | 5.41 | 6 |
| 25 days | 5.53 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.61 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.67 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.75 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
Dutch law states leave in hours, not days. Burgerlijk Wetboek art. 7:634 lid 1 gives at least four times the agreed weekly working time per year, so the entitlement is four working weeks and scales with the contract. On a 5-day week that is 20 working days (a 40-hour week earns 160 hours, divided by an 8-hour day norm). Public holidays are excluded and are not a statutory entitlement in the Netherlands at all.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 37.2-hour week, the typical full-time contract in the Netherlands, 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.
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 Netherlands
Statutory hours: the Netherlands has no statutory standard working week. The Arbeidstijdenwet (art. 5:7 lid 2, in force since 1 July 2025) sets only ceilings for workers 18 and over: 12 hours per shift, 60 hours in any single week, and an average of 48 hours per week over any 16 consecutive weeks, plus an average of 55 over 4 weeks (lid 3) that a collective agreement may set aside while lid 2 still binds. The 48 recorded here is that 16-week ceiling, not a normal week. Never present it as what Dutch full-timers work.
Contracted week: 37.2 hours is the employee-weighted average full-time week across the 141 largest collective agreements (5.4 million employees, reference date 1 January 2026), corrected for paid roster-free (adv) days, in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment's annual cao report. The same 37.2 was reported the previous year. The national average hides real spread: individual cao averages run from 34 to 40 hours, and 45 percent of covered employees (2.5 million) sit between 36 and 37 hours. Care, education and public administration cluster near 36, while transport, hospitality and industry sit near 38 to 40. Note that CBS's cao wage index reports a nominal contractual week of just over 39 hours because it strips adv out separately rather than netting it into the weekly figure; 37.2 is the better planning number because it already absorbs adv.
Public holidays, the classic Netherlands error: Dutch law gives no right to paid time off on public holidays. Ondernemersplein (Overheid.nl) states plainly that the law does not designate any day as a day off; it comes from the cao or the individual contract. So the 20 days is genuinely net of holidays, and there is no national paid-holiday count to net out either. Whether 5 May counts is contract-specific: it is a yearly paid day off for about 48 percent of cao employees and a once-every-five-years day off for another 34 percent.
Leave is a floor, not a norm. 20 days is the statutory minimum and only 16 of the 141 largest cao's stop there, most of them because extra days sit inside a personal choice budget. Real full-time entitlements are typically 25 or more, so run the sensitivity table rather than planning on 20.
Sickness conversion: CBS publishes a rate, not days. For the full year 2025 the employee sickness absence rate was 5.4 percent, and CBS glosses the metric as days lost out of every thousand days that should have been worked (a 5.8 percent rate means 58 of 1000). 2025 had 261 weekdays, so 0.054 x 261 = 14.1 working days lost per employee per year. That base is the full contract year. If you prefer a base of actually scheduled days after taking out roughly 8 weekday holidays and 20 leave days (about 233), the same rate gives 12.6 days, so 14.1 is the conservative end. The CBS measure includes long-term absence up to two years and excludes maternity and parental leave, so the mean is pulled well above the median employee, who loses far fewer days. The trend is upward: 5.2 percent in 2024, 5.4 in 2025, and 5.8 in Q1 2026.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory maxima: 12 hours per shift, 60 hours per week, average 48 hours per week over 16 consecutive weeks (art. 5:7 lid 2), average 55 hours over 4 weeks (lid 3)
Overheid.nl, Arbeidstijdenwet (consolidated text, in force from 1 July 2025)2025
Corroboration of the 12/60/55/48 working-time limits in plain language
Average full-time contractual week 37.2 hours, employee-weighted across the 141 largest collective agreements covering 5.4 million employees, reference date 1 January 2026, corrected for paid roster-free (adv) days; range 34 to 40 hours
Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (SZW), report Cao-afspraken 2026, chapter 52026
Statutory paid annual leave: at least four times the agreed weekly working time per year (Burgerlijk Wetboek art. 7:634 lid 1)
Overheid.nl, Burgerlijk Wetboek Boek 7 (consolidated text)2026
Worked example: a 40-hour week gives 160 statutory vacation hours, which is 20 statutory vacation days per year; extra days above this are bovenwettelijk
No statutory right to paid leave on public holidays; entitlement is set in the collective agreement or employment contract, separate from the 20 statutory vacation days
Employee sickness absence rate 5.4 percent for the full year 2025 (5.8 percent in Q1 2026); a 5.8 percent rate means 58 of every 1000 days that should have been worked were lost to illness
Definition used for the conversion: sick days as a percentage of total available working days, including absence lasting over a year, excluding maternity and parental leave, part-time weighted
CBS (Statistics Netherlands), begrippen: ziekteverzuimpercentage2026
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in the Netherlands?
- 6 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in the Netherlands is actually available for about 1,621 of them once 43.1 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 5.41, 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 the Netherlands that is 8,766 divided by 1,621, or 5.41. 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 the Netherlands?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.51 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.64, against a derived answer of 5.41. That is 4.4 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than the Netherlands actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in the Netherlands?
- 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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