Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe

7/4/2026 at 6:57:27 PM

Belgium law allows employers to enforce a sick note starting day 1.

I joined an employer that didn't require this, and it was such a breath of fresh air.

At our local doctor, the first 5 hours of his workday were comprised solely of writing notes for people to stay home.

It is a waste of (recovery) time to enforce everybody to get a note starting day one.

And describing the situation in the US on this to validate these changes is insane. Many people in the food business don't have paid sick leave, and as such lose pay when they don't come to work. And those people should absolutely have the ability to stay home without putting their finances in jeopardy. It should be a sign out front: we have paid sick leave for our people so they don't feel forced to come to work sick.

by OptionOfT

7/4/2026 at 7:54:15 PM

Even more than a day is terrible. If I have a cold or the flu, the last thing I want to do is to go to the doctor. I'd rather just rest up, it goes away in 3-5 days and I can be back at work.

The need for a doctor's notes means one of:

* I explain to my employer, probably don't get paid for those days, and might face disciplinary action or eventually get fired

* I go to the doctor, making my recovery less likely, increasing my stress levels which are already high due to my body fighting an infection, and risk infecting others or worse, catch something else myself for being made to cohabit space with other sick individuals

* I work even though I'm sick. If I do that from the office, I risk contaminating colleagues - and other people I interact with

There's no winning.

by cassianoleal

7/4/2026 at 7:02:30 PM

From which perspective are you talking about? Workers in Belgium or the US?

by joe_mamba

7/4/2026 at 7:14:53 PM

Disclaimer: I'm a US Citizen / Worker, white collar.

My first job had: Unlimited sick time. Take it when you need it. No doctor's note. I think you may have needed one at the week mark. Never hit at that employer. Most employers have been limited sick, with a note at a week.

I can't imagine note on day 1. That's just... nuts. The lack of trust shown there is massive. I'm making calls on stuff far larger than my sick days. If you can't trust me on sick days, how can you trust me to do my job?

by ilc

7/4/2026 at 7:20:16 PM

>The lack of trust shown there is massive.

All systems based on trust eventually get abused. Not by everyone of course, but catching a few with their hands in the cookie jar is enough to trigger a rethink on the whole trust-based thing. Most corporate German workers I knew were taking a few extra vacation days a year as sick leave, or using fake sick leave(often weeks or months!) as revenge if their employer didn't give them their desired raise or promotion. Their own admission, it's basically an open secret when you move there. Hell, we had German colleagues that would mysteriously get "sick" exactly before the customer delivery crunch, every-single-time, like clockwork.

The problem is when this becomes culturally normalized, more and more people do it as they see those abusing it get away with extra vacation days so then they think why wouldn't they do it too, otherwise they're suckers, right? And so after a while, the abuse starts to become so rampant and obvious to the employers as well, which leads to increasing the cost of doing business in Germany, and so everyone gets the collective punishment if they still wish to keep their jobs and not lose them to neighbouring countries that have cheaper labor because workers there don't abuse this system(yet). That's the same thing that ended 100% remote/WFH jobs and triggered the return to office mandates, too many people obviously scamming the trust based system pretending to work while actually doing nothing.

>I'm making calls on stuff far larger than my sick days. If you can't trust me on sick days, how can you trust me to do my job?

These policies aren't meant to target the German workers making important decisions who have a lot of bargaining power, but those on menial jobs to keep them working on the hamster wheel. It's what the communist system was designed to do to workers too. You keep them busy all day conforming to stupid bureaucracy and queues, and they're too busy to protest or switch jobs, forcing them into indentured servitude. Merz is a product of Blackrock after all. So it's either a 50 IQ move or a long term 500 IQ move.

Anyway, this isn't the first time in recent history when labor privileges were scaled back in Germany. Agenda 2010[1] did similar things, mostly by defanging unions. The truth is that those crazy good perks were gotten by the working class when Germany was the world industry leader post-WW2, but now Germany's industry output is at a 20 year low(thanks to a series of political and corporate self-owns) so it can't afford the same perks like in the past, and needs to scale back its generosity if it wishes to stay solvent. At the end of the day it's just business, and you need business to fund the welfare state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010

by joe_mamba

7/4/2026 at 7:24:03 PM

> System based on trust eventually get abused.

This is true. The tyrrany of the untrustworthy is that they destroy society for the rest of us.

The best thing we can do is control our spaces where it can be controlled. Don't hire untrustworthy people, be extremely punishing to those who break trust.

Rule 0 of any good community is: don't act in a way that makes me create a new rule. Workspaces are as much community as anywhere else, as much as Americans promote the idea that we're not actually fully human when working.

by dijit

7/4/2026 at 7:33:19 PM

There will always be abusers. The issue I see is day 1 asks. Not day N. If I'm out a week asking why is reasonable. If I'm out a day, it's more annoying for everyone.

And I'm not advocating for no limits with no responsibility to the employer. That'd be stupid. Clearly there's a "more sane" middle ground.

Even on a menial job, they are dealing with more value than they make daily, by definition.

A middle road exists, and it is solid, why it isn't being taken, I don't know.

by ilc

7/4/2026 at 7:19:12 PM

I don’t understand Merz’s obsession with this sick leave topic, like this is going solve the economic crisis in Germany and calling people lazy will score points with voters?

Fun fact: research shows it’s probably not better or worse than before, just more rigorously reported through a new digital system since couple years (before that people needed to send paper slip notes to their employers and insurance, which some just wouldn’t do so the data was incomplete).

On the other hand, they explained that they want to go back to the rules like they were before Covid. Effectively, this means that sick leave notes can be fixed contractually between employers and employees and a lot of companies and contracts have more flexible rules as also most HR departments don’t feel like dealing with the bureaucracy.

by frb

7/4/2026 at 6:14:49 PM

The reported average of 20 days is likely skewed by a small number of long leaves and I suspect* is nowhere near typical for the median worker (it's nearly taking a day off every two weeks).

Longer leave already requires a doctor's approval so the proposal to require that for all leave is unlikely to change much other than drown doctors in more busy work.

*I can't find much for the 'median' amount of leave taken per year.

by xen0

7/4/2026 at 6:38:11 PM

That's exactly right.

This article [1] mentions 40% of sick days being from people with long-term (> 6 weeks) illnesses. That's data from one of Germany's large insurers. While I don't know the proportion of those with long-term illnesses, if we assume it's at most 10%, then the average for people with "normal" short-term illnesses is at most 12 days. So much lower.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sind-die-deutschen-wirklich-h...

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 6:45:43 PM

> from one of Germany's large insurers

Is this voluntary insurance? It changes meaning to the statistic to % from those that made an insurance.

by realaleris149

7/4/2026 at 6:49:51 PM

I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance?

This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole.

But of course the point is, everyone with a tiny bit of true data could tell much more precise stories, and the journalists (as usual) didn't care or didn't think it would fly with readers.

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 7:04:26 PM

AOK insured 27 million in 2021, couldn't find a more recent number.

by TomK32

7/4/2026 at 7:15:04 PM

Whoops, misread the digit! Thanks for catching.

But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 7:01:13 PM

In Germany you need an insurance, but you can choose which one. In Berlin at least I remember TK was the default, but you can choose others.

by mejutoco

7/4/2026 at 7:27:32 PM

For clarification, “default” above doesn’t mean “In Berlin you get insured with TK by default”, and rather “Most people in Berlin will recommend choosing TK over a different state-mandated insurer”. TK was also very popular when I was back in university in Frankfurt. It might just still be the one with reasonable prices!

by mimischi

7/4/2026 at 6:42:40 PM

I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...

by pfortuny

7/4/2026 at 6:44:31 PM

To be fair, the median is just as little information as the mean. We live in a world where ink is cheap, they should just show a histogram.

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 7:32:40 PM

in this case the median matters a lot more. most people either get sick for a couple days to weeks with something like the flu, or get a more serious illness/injury like a complex fracture that takes them out for months. the first type is much more common but the long leave cases push up the mean.

by tancop

7/4/2026 at 6:36:16 PM

"As part of Merz's proposals, from January next year, workers will no longer be able to get a sick note over the phone. They must visit a doctor in person and on the first day of illness."

Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack.

by anthonj

7/4/2026 at 6:47:31 PM

I had a migraine attack recently; I was able to call my doctor and have him write a sick note for a day over the phone and have it transmitted digitally to my employer. What the fuck would be the point of tormenting myself for half an hour on a noisy public bus in bright daylight in the middle of summer, the waiting in a bright room for half an hour, wait at the bus stop in bright daylight for up to an hour for the next bus back (since I don't know how long I will be at the doctor's office I cannot plan my trip back) and then torture myself for another half hour on the bus back?

It's not like the doctor can do anything but take my word for it when I'm in his office anyway. There is no migraine test you can run. So you might as well cut out all the bullshit and let me rest so I can recover better.

by HiPhish

7/4/2026 at 6:58:39 PM

> Can't wait to share the sbahn with feverish people or seeing a live diarrhea attack.

The 2 results I see from this change in policy is:

1. People go sick to work and possibly infect other people

2. Doctors give multi day sick notes (when 1 day would have been enough) to not be bothered again the next day, resulting in people being home longer when not needed.

I genuinely don't understand who looked at this policy change and thought "this will probably help with people working more". The only people that will be working more are the "Hausärzte".

by NekkoDroid

7/4/2026 at 7:04:26 PM

>I genuinely don't understand who looked at this policy change and thought "this will probably help with people working more".

Lawmakers aren't smarter than average people. In fact, they're often more out of touch with reality despite fancier education and credentials. They just make laws based on feels to score brownie points with a certain voter base or demographic. In this case it's with retired boomers who think young workers today are too weak and dodging work to sit at home doing nothing on the taxpayer's dime because that's the impression they got from the tabloid media who portrays zoomers and immigrants as lazy and avoiding work living on welfare.

For example in Austria during Covid the government shortened supermarket opening times to so called "protect our service workers" while missing the fact that this meant that people were now doing the same volume of shopping but spread over a smaller time period of the day, which meant more crowds and less social distancing, meaning more chance of spreading the virus.

So not only were they actually NOT protecting the supermarket workers with this measure, on the contrary, but they were also actively making the spread worse through the increased crowds of shoppers. But nobody in the public understood this second order effect, and actively cheered for this measure as a sign the government care about the average worker. That's how laws are passed nowadays, cheap low-iq populism with zero though for the second order effects and externalities on others.

by joe_mamba

7/4/2026 at 7:03:38 PM

People who call in sick by phone aren't sick

by on_the_train

7/4/2026 at 7:44:43 PM

People who make such blanket statements only see things in black and white.

by pixelpoet

7/4/2026 at 6:25:55 PM

I wonder if lost productivity from sick leave days is offset by preserved productivity of all coworkers that were not infected by people that felt obliged to show up sick with flu or other communicable disease.

by Qem

7/4/2026 at 6:30:54 PM

We're about to find out! Not to mention all the doctors who'll be getting sick from hordes of people with basic cold and flu piling up in their practices.

Man, Merz truly is a genius! You can tell he's had so much experience in normal jobs, truly understands the average worker's situation.

by pixelpoet

7/4/2026 at 6:55:55 PM

>Man, Merz truly is a genius! You can tell he's had so much experience in normal jobs, truly understands the average worker's situation.

What else do you expect from a Blackrock veteran and possible trojan horse?

Heck, I don't even blame him, same how I don't blame a scorpion for stinging the frog, it's just in its nature, I blame the Germans that voted for him. As a democracy, every such national fuckup(and they have a lot of those) is 100% on them and so are the consequences. You reap what you sow.

by joe_mamba

7/4/2026 at 6:34:04 PM

It's classism. Working class are suspicious. Let's check if they are _not_ lying, wholesale.

by varispeed

7/4/2026 at 8:05:57 PM

Of course sick leave has increased in Germany, but the main reason is reporting. Since 2022 in Germany there is a new electronic sick note and doctors report every certificate directly to insurers. Before that short illnesses very often went uncounted.

I find it quite concerning and clickbaity that this reason is also included but comes relative late in the article:

One major reason for the rise in sick leave is better reporting, IGES wrote in its report published in January.

by karussell

7/4/2026 at 6:48:25 PM

Yeah, I have no idea how any of these figures are derived, but... I have a hard time imagining a planet where 1.8 weeks of our Polish employees and 2.7 weeks of our Dutch employees are 'lost due to sick leave' per annum.

Days? Maybe. Weeks? On average? Nah... But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"

by IveSeenItAll

7/4/2026 at 7:05:47 PM

I probably get there, but I have young kids.

But yes, these are averages between 1 person having 12 weeks and 12 people with 1 week. It's most likely power law distributed, so the average will feel weird.

There are people with cancer, severe car crashes and other horrible but temporary medical conditions in this average.

by 317070

7/4/2026 at 8:05:58 PM

> There are people with cancer

Oh, yeah, I know. One of our top (young! sad!) people in .nl has been intermittently-working for, like, months now due to that, unfortunately. But... that doesn't count as "sick leave"! Because, it's, like entirely foreseeable!

What is happening is that they, through the medical consultancy working for the employer (i.e. "us"), submit their proposed working schedule a few weeks in advance. This will have several 'non-work' days (around chemo), some 'partial-work' days, and so on, basically with hourly granularity.

"We" then plan and account accordingly: "we" pay for a few hours, insurance for a few, national-level insurance for a lot, but all "we" see is a plan for actual working time.

Conflating any of that with "oh, you can just stay home whenever you want" is sick and wrong, like so much of the discussion here around "Europe." I mean, you get eviscerated for wrongly naming a Chicago suburb, but blanket statements about an entire continent are de rigeur

by IveSeenItAll

7/4/2026 at 7:36:14 PM

> But, please, do continue your explanations of "see, this is why Europe can't compete"

Okay, let's consider what laws like this (the existing one) do.

In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note, regardless of whether the law allows them to. Sick days are like vacation days, it's your own business how you use them. This is fine. And if you want to make a major long-term disability claim then you'll be expected to prove it, but that seems overall pretty reasonable?

That's the common case. No major incentive for employers to cause friction with workers who are mostly acting in good faith. Then there are employers who are, let's say, less selective about their employees, will hire anyone willing to do the job, but correspondingly then see a high rate of fraud. These employers want to be able to demand evidence all the time because the sort of people they're willing to hire would be taking three months of paid vacation a year as sick days if they could get away with it.

Since the law applies to everyone, what does a law like that do? In the common case it does nothing because the employer doesn't do it regardless. In the high fraud cause it prevents something good and increases actual fraud.

So the only time it does something good is the uncommon edge case on the other side where the employer requires that even though their employees mostly weren't faking sick days. And because most employers for that type of work don't do that, those employers don't get any major benefit from it anyway and employees don't like it, the ones who do are at a competitive disadvantage, so it stays uncommon.

Which means the main effect of the law is to cause problems for the employers willing to do "second chance" hiring of people who might screw them over, which harms not only the employer but also those workers when employers stop being willing to hire them because the law requires them to take the hit if they do.

by AnthonyMouse

7/4/2026 at 8:28:41 PM

> In the US most employers don't care if you take a normal number of sick days, don't require a doctor's note

In .nl (and .pl also, although I'm less familiar with actual practices there, just because we haven't had anyone sick there in the last decade or so) there is no "normal number of sick days", and a "doctor's note" is also entirely unheard of.

If you cannot work for medical reasons, you report this to your employer, which will then (in most cases) hand off things entirely to a medical consultancy working for them. Obviously, this will not be done for 4-to-8-hour absences (again, in most cases), but definitely for anything beyond that, and if an employee tries to game the system, there are safeguards for the company there as well.

The medical consultancy will establish a plan for working hours for the next month or so (depending on the severity of the condition) and submit that to the employer: they don't get any details beyond that (in fact, that would be highly illegal). Depending on the duration of employee absence, there are various levels of insurance that (may) kick in, but the main focus is to provide a (literally) workable schedule.

Oh, and if an employee gets sick while on holiday, the same scheme applies. I found that one really gets everyone nonfamiliar with "European" working culture going...

by IveSeenItAll

7/4/2026 at 7:11:57 PM

To put this into perspective, young children have an average amount of 16 colds per year (there's even a cool repo for incidence data, I suspect you could get more precise [1]). With an increasing number of parents both being in the labor market, and with childcare facilities increasingly (and rightfully IMO) refusing to take in sick kids, this means that parents need to take their own sick days to care for them.

It's difficult to do a back of the napkin calculation, but you can easily see how 16 colds x 3 days / 2 parents leads to 24 excess sick days for parents per kid (discounting for some overlap when multiple kids are sick) over the first few years.

[1] https://github.com/robert-koch-institut/GrippeWeb_Daten_des_...

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 6:56:52 PM

Immigrants and expats. My colleague from India, who lives and works with me in the Netherlands, calls in sick at least once per month.

by pelorat

7/4/2026 at 7:32:12 PM

[Weekendmodus:] First the thing seem to be, that there were a depressive pilot, some years ago, who made an "extended-suicide". The people across Germany were told, "It was, cos the company hasn't known, that a doctor issued a 'sick note' (In Terms of: When he was unable to work - he should't fly a plane with more than 100 people on board.')."

There was a need for a soulution, so my bet was on the workers side: "If the doctors send the "sick-note" directly to the employer (via "Fax" or email), you'll save a Stamp at minimum, or doesn't have to visit your workplace, ill." Everybody who went sick one time, knows that it is not easy every time, to visit someone when you're ill, not?

That is one of the Mistakes somebody would take granted, by those what the media seem to hide for -you know "generating hype and clicks about".

And for the 2nd, (verry distracting by now): If doctors now have to inform employers within day one, that'll fit it perfect.

So no "hysteria", no "hype". People seem to forget fast -in not my words: "Just a school class who died by that extended suicide" but in memory of that... by remembering it...

regards (-:

by justafewwords

7/4/2026 at 7:28:20 PM

Since the late 80s, Sweden has a system where on the first day when you're off work due to illness, you're not paid ("karensdag").

I started working just before this system was put in place, and there was so much sick leave claimed that people were seriously wondering why Swedish workplaces were so unhealthy. A year after the reform, the numbers fell precipitously.

by gerikson

7/4/2026 at 6:40:58 PM

Doctors in Germany love to put you off work for longer than necessary. Usually the whole week. I totally see that this will result in average going up instead of down.

by xjrk58x

7/4/2026 at 6:48:07 PM

Do people consult doctors to obtain medical leaves shorter than a week? It seems like a waste of time for everybody involved. Either the problem is bad enough that you need time off and you might as well round it up to a week, or the problem is benign enough that you don't need time off at all.

by tredre3

7/4/2026 at 6:55:41 PM

That's the whole point, before they would only need to do it on the fourth day of sickness, now you need to go to a doctor on the first day. More workload for doctors and either sick people coming to the office infecting others, or getting the whole week off immediately.

by jann

7/4/2026 at 7:54:11 PM

If you need such laws to be enforced in order to keep your workforce on leash... you are either a very uninspiring employer or you are the current german chancellor. Good bye german economy with such an uninspiring leadership.

by siva7

7/4/2026 at 7:22:49 PM

I'm Norwegian. I have not taken a single day of sick leave (M51). I believe that if I get sick, it is my fault and responsibility, and I should not burden the employer or public sector with that.

In 2009 i fell off a bike and hurt a knee. My fault. So I took 5 days of my vacation to stay home.

by arnejenssen

7/4/2026 at 7:25:14 PM

I can relate to the attitude, but I also suspect it's a lot easier to live like this in one of the two richest countries in the world with the least stressful labor markets (going by the experience of my friends who emigrated there).

by uniqueuid

7/4/2026 at 7:30:36 PM

What’s the insurance setup like in norway? In germany at least, your insurance pays for (at least part) of this time, and since its mandatory to pay it and hundreds of euros a month, I’m not in any way inclined to give up my precious family time (holidays) to save my insurer money. I have a hard time understanding how one would feel otherwise.

Also, generally, I can’t think of a time i had off work where something ultimately failed to be delivered because of it, I’ll typically put in some extra time etc when i’m back if a deadline is looming.

So who really loses?

by cyberpunk

7/4/2026 at 7:40:27 PM

So you go to work sick ?

by Melatonic

7/4/2026 at 7:02:33 PM

What pisses me off about all this is that the there is the underlying assumption that the working class is with the lazy working class. No, the problem is efficiency and incompetence at the top levels, not at the bottom. Running faster in the wrong direction won't get us any closes to the goal.

Let me make a proposal and you tell me what you think of it. I'd say the fundamental problem is career culture, the idea that mobility is valued over reliability. What I mean by that the culture of collecting good-boy points by starting projects, building PowerPoint slides and giving the appearance of getting work done, all in order to get a promotion and jump ship to the next higher position before your sloppiness catches up with you. Someone else is left holding the bag. If people had to actually own what they shit out in the long-term things would be much different. You either fall or rise with whatever projects you start. You might be able to bullshit your way through the corporate structures for a year or two, but ten years? No, if your project is to last for ten years you better put actual effort into it, not just the bare minimum to produce Potemkin slides.

Look at Stuttgart 21[1]. The reason it has been moved to 2031 (at the very least) is not because of the grunt worker being too slow. It is systemic failure at the top. Is it incompetence or malice? I don't know, you pick which option is worse. What I do know is that it cannot be the common worker on the ground who has to pay the price for it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21

by HiPhish

7/4/2026 at 7:11:19 PM

Fehmarnbelttunnel is the better example because you can see the difference in legislation between Denmark and Germany. Denmark passes laws for projects of such importance while in Germany the project has to hop over every existing legislative hurdle that are great for preventing smaller projects going bad, but do cost extra time and money on a larger scale.

by TomK32

7/4/2026 at 6:37:37 PM

Looking at the OCED data per country, it's pretty clear that it has zero links with the economy

by realusername

7/4/2026 at 6:59:34 PM

It's mostly cultural. In some countries like Germany, Sweden or Netherlands, it's normalized that if you wake up tired or hungover or have a sore throat, you just don't show up at work that day, but in others it's frowned up and your boomer parents and many peers will look at you like you're needlessly weak and avoiding your adult responsibilities by letting a little headache or sniff hold you back from your duties.

That's how you see Eastern Europe actually having much fewer sick days from work despite lower life expectancy and a less performant healthcare system than the west. The communist system and post-communist hardship from the economic collapse meant people had no chance but to work no matter what, if they wanted to eat that day. Not going to work because of a cold or headache or things like depression or burnout was unthinkable to the generation that grew up under those conditions and they perpetuated that mindset to Millennials too. Sick leave was only if something was falling off. That's why Eastern European immigrants who migrated west were so valued for their work ethic. Granted, now thanks to Gen-z things are changing for the better and are adopting the more nordic and ladi back mindset on work ethic.

by joe_mamba

7/4/2026 at 6:48:57 PM

I wonder which spreadsheet manager assumed that if I am sick 1 day per month, I actually am also 1 day less productive.

I am not; the same amount of work gets done. Probably more because I’m not half-sick on the job for 3 days instead.

by moi2388

7/4/2026 at 7:27:12 PM

Stupid idea. Doctors are incentivised to just give out a sick note to anyone that asks. There's no downside for them if they do that, and if they don't, they get complaints from the public.

It seems likely to me that we will end up with private companies being paid by employers to evaluate your health and determine if you can go off sick. Not the nicest solution but I don't see what other option there is given the level of abuse.

Either that or companies will drastically lower the amount of paid sick leave they give, maybe to zero like in the US. I think that would be even worse.

by IshKebab

7/4/2026 at 6:11:37 PM

These averages are insane!

by sscaryterry

7/4/2026 at 6:58:42 PM

yes. and driven by long term sicknesses like, for example, burnout, cancer, and work-related older age issues.

dropping phone-in sick calls will sure as hell end those /s

this whole package is driven by populist disinformation.

by froh

7/4/2026 at 6:43:17 PM

why are governments always trying to find something to fuck over the working class?

by sunsetSamurai

7/4/2026 at 6:02:26 PM

[dead]

by black_13