Wendy (37): "I was really shocked, there was something completely wrong with my holiday pay"

“This can’t be right,” I said out loud as I looked again at the amount on my payslip.

My youngest was sitting at the table eating a cracker while I was working on the shopping list for our vacation. This summer we were finally going to spend a week in France. Nothing fancy, just a campsite with a swimming pool for the kids, but still something we had saved up for over months and had really been looking forward to. That’s exactly why I checked my vacation pay as soon as my salary came in. Only the amount was far too low. The more I looked at those numbers, the more my gut feeling started screaming that something was really wrong here. And afterwards that feeling turned out to be completely justified. I kept doing the math in my head. That vacation pay was already fully built into our plans for the summer. Suddenly I started to doubt whether we’d even be able to afford that vacation at all.

I have been working in healthcare for years

Three days officially. But in reality I work much more. Overtime has pretty much become standard for us. Illness, staff shortages and gaps in the schedules mean you’re constantly stepping in. Especially over the past year I’ve worked an incredible amount of extra hours. Evening shifts, weekend shifts, and regularly extra hours on my days off. Not because I always felt like it, but because otherwise the work simply wouldn’t get done. In a way, those extra hours also felt like an investment in our family. It meant we could do more fun things.

My husband would sometimes even say that I worked too much

Maybe he was right about that. But with rising prices and two children, working extra hours sometimes just felt necessary. On top of that, I also thought: in the end I’ll see those hours reflected on my payslip. That’s what you rely on, after all. That’s why holiday pay felt especially important to me this year. We had finally booked a holiday. It was quite a sum for our family. The children were already counting down the weeks. My husband and I had even deliberately spent very little extra for months: no big purchases, no expensive outings, just being careful for a while.

My daughter had already made a list of things that needed to be taken on vacation.

Water wings, new flip-flops, an inflatable flamingo she’d seen online. Those kinds of little things are what make holidays magical for children, of course. When I saw the holiday allowance, it immediately felt strange. By now I know my salary pretty well. You have a rough sense of what makes sense. And this amount absolutely did not feel right. In fact, it was off by hundreds of euros compared to what I expected. Meanwhile, my daughter was happily chatting about the campsite while I was getting quieter and quieter.

At first I still thought that I was the one making a mistake

So I pulled out old payslips. I recalculated everything, but every time I ended up much higher than what had actually been paid. In that moment I mainly felt stress building up. Not just irritation, but real panic. Normally I’m not someone who gets upset about paperwork very quickly. But now I immediately felt that something was seriously wrong here. The more often I calculated, the bigger the difference seemed to get.

We just needed that money.

The holiday had been paid for based on what we thought we were going to get. And suddenly it just looked like a large amount of money had disappeared. My husband first tried to reassure me. He thought that holiday pay might be calculated differently than I thought, or that part of it would come later. “No,” I said. “This just isn’t right.” I still started doubting myself. “Maybe we need to cut things from the holiday,” I thought. Fewer outings, maybe. Not eating out on holiday.

In the end, I actually discovered it by chance

I was in a group chat with colleagues where someone brought up holiday pay. One colleague wrote, laughing, that her amount was much higher this year because of all the overtime. And suddenly I thought: wait a second. I was pretty sure my overtime wasn’t included at all. I immediately grabbed my annual statement. And then I saw it. My contracted hours had been included. But all those extra shifts from the past year hadn’t. Many extra hours were completely missing from the calculation. Suddenly everything fell into place. My gut feeling turned out to be absolutely right.

I wasn’t crazy

And also not bad at math. There really was a huge amount missing. That made me furious. In the end, it turned out to be almost 1,300 euros gross. When I saw that amount, I was genuinely shocked. That’s not a small mistake anymore, that’s just a gigantic difference. Especially for an ordinary family like ours.

I immediately emailed the payroll department

At first I was still very polite. “Maybe it’s just a mistake,” I thought. “That can happen, of course.” But in the meantime I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier. Especially because I had worked so many extra hours. I had given up weekends, worked evenings while other families were at home. I had often felt completely exhausted. And now it turned out that work hadn’t even been processed properly. I really checked that email three times before I sent it. Because I was afraid I would sound too angry. Above all, I felt powerless. As if I had to prove that I was entitled to money I had simply worked hard for.

To be honest, HR’s response just made me even angrier.

Because at first I just got a pretty standard reply. That the calculation “seemed correct according to the system.” I felt frustration shoot through my body when I read that. So then I started gathering everything. Schedules, time sheets, old payslips. I was literally sitting at the table until late, laying everything out side by side. I wasn’t being taken seriously at all. As if I was once again the one making a fuss about money. While it was actually about a serious amount of money. That only made me more determined to fight.

The more I looked into it, the clearer it became

The overtime hours had been processed incorrectly on a structural basis. Not just for one month, but for several months in a row. As a result, the holiday pay ended up being wrong as well. I started seriously wondering how many colleagues might not have noticed this. I never used to look very closely at payslips either. You just trust that they’re correct. Especially with large organizations, but apparently a lot goes wrong there too. This should simply never have happened.

In the end, I was called by someone from payroll.

Then the tone suddenly changed quite a bit. Apparently they had checked my calculations. And suddenly it turned out that “something had gone wrong after all.” To be honest, I thought that was putting it rather mildly. According to them, there had been a problem in the system related to overtime, which meant certain extra shifts hadn’t been properly included. How exactly that could happen remained a bit vague. They immediately offered their apologies. I was relieved that this was being resolved. Thank goodness.

In the end, I turned out to be right

It turned out that my calculation was correct. The outstanding amount would still be paid out. Fortunately. What if I hadn’t happened to find out about it through that colleague? Honestly, I don’t even want to think about how many people might never check this. Or how much money is quietly processed incorrectly without anyone saying anything.

Colleagues also suddenly started looking more closely at their own amounts after that.

And guess what? For several people it turned out that something wasn’t quite right either. I found that really shocking. Apparently I was far from the only one. Fortunately, our holiday to France is still going ahead as planned. The children, of course, don’t know anything about it. All they think about is swimming and ice cream. It’s going to be a fantastic holiday! Thanks in part to this holiday allowance.

In hindsight, I think what scares me most is how easily something like that can happen.

Because I’m really not a financial expert. I’m just someone who works hard and assumes that payroll is correct. Especially in sectors where a lot of overtime is worked. That trust turned out to be pretty naïve, actually. My colleague who eventually made that comment in the group chat doesn’t even know how much impact it had. She just made a light-hearted remark about her high holiday pay. Without her message I probably would have only discovered much later that something was wrong. Maybe not at all.

Still, in a way I’m glad I pushed through

Because as uncomfortable as I felt constantly having to call and email to chase things up, in the end I was simply right. My gut feeling had been spot on from the very beginning. So my tip: double-check your holiday pay!

WENDY