Holidays
You aren't legally required to give your employees days off for federal or state holidays. In fact, if you need to, you can require that they work on Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, or any other traditional holiday. However, many employers do have specified holidays when employees do not have to work. Whether or not you give time off for holidays should depend on several factors:
Whether or not you want to pay employees for them. If you don't want to pay employees for the holiday, chances are most employees won't take the time anyway, unless it is a religious holiday or unless you allow them to use a vacation day (if you offer paid vacation benefits). Most employees won't take a day off if they won't get paid for it. However, having to work on a day when almost all other businesses are closed is sure to cause some resentment on the part of your employees. Remember — time off is a valuable commodity to most workers.
What type of business you have. If you're in a business that must deal with other businesses that observe the holiday, it may be better to give the employee the holiday off. If they have to do a lot of interacting with other businesses that will be closed, they won't get much done anyway. On the other hand, if you have a business that might do big business on a holiday, such as a store or a restaurant, you may want to stay open and pay the employees who do work time and a half or double time, as is often the custom.
If you want the holiday off. You may want the day off to spend with your family or pursue some recreational activities. If you're going to be out, you may just want to close the business for the holiday. If you use this approach, be sure to give employees enough time to plan for their holiday and try to be consistent in the holidays that you take off. If you take a holiday off one year but not the next, employees (and customers) won't know how to plan for their holiday.
One thing you should know about paid time off for holidays is that the payments cannot be credited toward meeting the minimum wage requirements for any given pay period.
The average number of paid holidays for full-time employees is 9.3. Virtually all companies provide the following as paid holidays:
- New Year's Day
- Memorial Day
- Easter
- Independence Day
- Labor Day
- Thanksgiving Day
- Christmas Day
And they frequently add others from the following list:
- Washington's Birthday or President's Day
- Good Friday
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
- Veterans' Day
- Columbus Day
- the Friday after Thanksgiving
- Christmas Eve
- New Year's Eve
Some businesses add still other days, such as a floating day, election day, or the employee's birthday. Some also have state holidays that they observe. Click on your state on the map below to get a list of observed holidays:
Religious holidays. Dealing with religious holidays can be tricky. Antidiscrimination laws prohibit you from discriminating against employees in the basis of religion, and religious holidays can produce some problems for you in providing time off for religious reasons. The basic rule is that an employer's failure or refusal to accommodate the religious needs of employees becomes religious discrimination if the employer could make such accommodation without undue hardship to the owner's business.
Here are some options you may want to consider:
- Allow individuals to use vacation (or a floating day off to be taken at the employee's discretion) or other eligible leave pay when observing their religious holidays.
- Grant religious holidays (other than those previously designated as holidays) without pay as an excused absence.
- Allow employees to take religious holidays and then make up the time.
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