Overview
The Maltese government has announced that, as from 4th April 2025, employees may take up to four days off work for urgent family related matters. The four days are to be split as follows:
- 16 hours are to be deducted from the employee's annual vacation leave;
- 16 hours are to be deudcted from the employee's sick leave entitlement.
Prior to April 2025, employees were allowed to take up to 15 hours of Urgent Family Leave. This leave may be used to care for family members (in cases where children are unwell, or parents require help).
Permissions
To request leave, employees must have the "Request Leave" permission. By default, employees can only request vacation leave, whereas admins can book a variety of leave types, including sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, injury leave, and others. These leave types can be added to your company's account. To modify the leave types available to your employees, instructions here.
Admins or users with both "Request Leave" and "Approve Leave" permissions, as well as the ability to book Sick or other leave types, can still request these leave types, even if the "Allow user to request" toggle is turned off.
Urgent Family Leave - How to record this
The global leave entitlements for Vacation Leave and Sick Leave can be found under the Entitlements tab in the Leave section. Therefore, employees already have their 32 hours of Urgent Family Leave stored within these entitlements. However, Urgent Family Leave is not a specific leave type. Urgent Family Leave is made up of 16 hours (2 days) from the employee's Vacation leave entitlement and 16 hours (2 days) from the employee's Sick leave entitlement, so it may be hard to track which leave request is for Urgent Family Leave. To allow you to book and keep records of Urgent Family Leave (when this must be availed of), we have two workaround solutions which you may choose to implement:
Booking Urgent Family Leave with Leave Tags
The first option is to use Leave tags (click on the link for info on how to set these up). Our recommendation here is to create a leave tag called 'Urgent Family Leave' for both Vacation Leave and Sick Leave:
When requesting Urgent Family Leave (be it through Vacation or Sick leave), you will need to select the 'Urgent Family Leave' tag:
After the leave is booked, you will then be able to generate a Leave Reports (full leave export) with this data:
Creating a new Leave Type
An alternative approach is to create an entirely new leave type called Urgent Family Leave. Our recommendation here is that when someone books such leave, 32 hours from the employee's Vacation and Sick leave balances (16 hours each - or less if not all the 32 hours are utilised) are to be manually deducted from the employee's balance:
Either of the two approaches will allow you to track Urgent Family Leave usage. The second option requires manual intervention, so you will need to make sure to amend the Vacation and Sick Leave balances accordingly.