How to plan a company holiday calendar

Every summer the same scene plays out in many SMEs: May or June arrives, three people ask for the same fortnight in August, someone from a key department heads off just when the workload peaks, and the manager ends up juggling a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. A good holiday calendar avoids almost all of these problems. In this article we explain how to plan it well in advance, what Spanish law says about who decides the dates, and how to manage it without friction or paperwork.

Essential tips for organising your holiday calendar

Planning holidays isn’t just about handing out days off: it’s about making sure the business keeps running while the team rests. Here are the keys to getting it right:

• Analyse the needs of each area. Identify the busiest periods and the services that can’t be left uncovered. An admin team is not the same as a customer service or production team.
• Set specific windows for taking holidays. Many companies establish windows (for example, between June and September) or even collective shutdowns. Make the deadlines for requesting and taking each year’s days crystal clear.
• Limit how many people can be off at once. Define a maximum number of simultaneous absences per department so an area is never left short-staffed.
• Establish a fair, transparent order of priority. Seniority, rotation from the previous year, family responsibilities or simply the order of requests: pick a criterion, write it down and apply it consistently. That way you avoid favouritism and disputes.
• Plan ahead. The sooner you know the requests, the more room you have to solve the puzzle and reorganise the work. Ideally, close the calendar a couple of months before summer.

When is the holiday calendar set?

Your sector’s convenio colectivo (collective bargaining agreement) usually sets the ground rules: number of days, whether there are preferred periods, whether there’s a collective shutdown, and so on. From there, artículo 38 del Estatuto de los Trabajadores (article 38 of the Spanish Workers’ Statute) requires the holiday calendar to be set by mutual agreement between the employer and the employee, and lays down a key point: every employee must know their dates at least two months in advance of the start of their leave.

That’s why the practical recommendation is simple: open the request process at the start of the year or, at the latest, in spring, and have the calendar closed before summer begins. Getting ahead gives you room to negotiate, resolve overlaps and communicate the dates within the legal deadline.

Who chooses the holiday dates?

This is one of the most common questions. The short answer: neither does the employer decide them exclusively, nor can the employee impose them unilaterally. The Estatuto de los Trabajadores establishes that the holiday period is set by common agreement between both parties, always respecting what the collective bargaining agreement says.

If there’s no agreement, the law provides for the jurisdicción social (Spanish labour courts) to set the dates through a preferential and summary procedure, and their decision is final. Nobody wants it to reach that point, of course. That’s why it pays to have clear allocation criteria from the outset: when everyone knows how the decision is made, agreement is reached on its own in the vast majority of cases.

How do I manage my employees’ holidays?

This is where many SMEs are still stuck with Excel. It works… until it doesn’t: sheets that get overwritten, day balances nobody can reconcile, requests by email or WhatsApp that get lost, and a manager spending hours on something that should be automatic. On top of that, with a shared file it’s easy for two people to request the same dates without anyone noticing in time.

The alternative is holiday and absence management software that centralises everything in a single place. With a tool like LapsoWork, each person sees their available day balance, requests dates from their phone and gets the answer instantly, while the manager approves or rejects at a glance, seeing who else is off on those days.

How does LapsoWork’s holiday and absence management work?

The full workflow is resolved in three steps:

1. The employee requests their days from the app, choosing the dates in their calendar. The system shows them how many days they have left, so nobody over-requests.
2. The manager receives the request with a notification and approves or rejects it with a click. When they do, they can see whether those dates overlap with those of other colleagues on the same team, to avoid leaving an area uncovered.
3. The employee receives the answer instantly and the dates are automatically reflected in the shared calendar and in the day balance. Everything logged, with no emails or Excel versions.

The result: less admin time, zero conflicts over overlaps, and a reliable record of days taken and pending for each person.

Collective bargaining agreements and regional particularities

Before considering the calendar closed, always check your sector or company convenio colectivo, because it may improve on the legal minimum and add its own rules. Some agreements grant more than 22 working days of holiday, provide for additional days based on seniority, set preferred periods for taking leave, or regulate how public holidays that fall within the holiday period are counted.

It’s also worth bearing in mind local and regional public holidays: they’re not the same in Madrid as in Seville, Bilbao or Palma, and a long weekend or a regional holiday can throw off your coverage plans. If your company has offices in several autonomous communities, the best approach is to manage each working calendar by location. Good HR software lets you configure the public holidays for each site so that day and absence calculations are accurate without you having to do it by hand.

In summary

A well-planned holiday calendar rests on three pillars: anticipation (close the dates at least two months ahead), clear allocation criteria that everyone knows, and a tool that centralises requests, approvals and balances. When those three pieces fit together, summer stops being a headache and becomes a process that practically runs itself.

And if you handle time tracking and holidays from the same platform, you have all your team’s working-hours and absence information in a single place, ready for any calculation, review or inspection.