Payroll

Leave Entitlements Under the BCEA in South Africa

Annual, sick, family responsibility, maternity and parental leave: the minimum days South Africa's BCEA guarantees every employee, explained plainly.

Updated 2026-07-30

Employment contracts love to invent their own version of leave, but the Basic Conditions of Employment Act sets a floor every employer has to clear regardless of what the contract says. Five categories, five minimums. Here's what the law actually requires.

Annual and sick leave: the two that accrue

Every employee is entitled to 21 consecutive days of paid annual leave per annual leave cycle, meaning a year of employment with you. If that's easier to think about in smaller units, it works out the same as 1 day of leave for every 17 days worked, or 1.25 days for every completed month. Use whichever calculation suits how you run payroll, because they land in the same place.

Sick leave is where the intuition breaks, because it doesn't reset every January. It runs on a 36-month cycle, and across that cycle an employee is entitled to the number of days they would normally work in six weeks. For someone on a standard 5-day week that's 30 days of paid sick leave across three years, not 30 days a year, which is a big enough difference to be worth saying out loud to anyone who assumes otherwise. New employees work differently again for their first six months: they earn 1 day of paid sick leave for every 26 days worked, until the normal 36-month cycle takes over.

Family responsibility, maternity and parental leave

Family responsibility leave is the small one people forget exists until the day someone needs it. An employee who has worked for you for more than four months, and who works at least four days a week, gets 3 days of paid family responsibility leave a year. It covers the birth of their child, a child's illness, and the death of an immediate family member.

Maternity leave is larger and works on a different principle. An employee is entitled to at least 4 consecutive months, and the BCEA does not require you to pay her salary during that time. What it does instead is leave a route open: she can claim a maternity benefit from the UIF for the period she's off, provided her contributions have been paid correctly. Whether you top that up is a business decision, not a legal one.

Parental leave follows the same unpaid-by-you pattern. Since the 2019 amendment, a parent who isn't taking maternity leave (a father, an adoptive parent, a partner in a surrogacy arrangement) is entitled to 10 consecutive days, also claimable through the UIF.

These are minimums, not the ceiling

Nothing stops a contract, a bargaining council agreement, or your own leave policy from being more generous than the BCEA. What isn't allowed is going below it.

The part worth understanding is what happens when a contract simply doesn't mention one of these. The Act fills the gap automatically, whether the employer realises it or not, so a silent contract doesn't mean no entitlement. It means the statutory minimum, and you're liable for it either way.

Getting these five numbers right, and keeping a live balance for each employee instead of a memory of what you agreed, is exactly what E·BIZI Pay tracks for you.

Common questions

Do part-time employees get the same leave as full-time staff?

Annual leave and sick leave are both based on days actually worked, so someone working fewer days accrues proportionally less of each. Family responsibility leave works differently: it needs more than four months of service and at least four working days a week.

Is maternity leave paid?

Not by you. The BCEA doesn't require an employer to pay salary during maternity leave. The employee can claim a maternity benefit from the UIF instead, as long as her contributions are up to date. Some employers top this up voluntarily, but nothing forces it.

What counts as family responsibility leave?

Three days a year, once someone has worked for you for more than four months and works at least four days a week. It covers things like the birth of a child, a child's illness, and the death of a close family member.

Does sick leave reset every year like annual leave?

No. It runs on a 36-month cycle, not the calendar year. The first six months of employment work differently too: one paid sick day for every 26 days worked, before the normal cycle takes over.