Annual leave, sick leave and public holidays for Malaysian hair salon staff: the owner's guide

Your senior stylist asks for the whole of Raya week off, in March, politely and first. Your junior, eight months in, hands you an MC on a fully booked Saturday morning. And somewhere between the two you realise you have never actually written down how many days of leave anyone in your salon is entitled to, or what happens when a public holiday lands on the Monday the salon is closed anyway.

The statutory answers live in the Employment Act 1955, and since the 2022 amendments took effect on 1 January 2023 they cover every employee on your payroll regardless of salary, so every stylist, junior and receptionist gets the entitlements in this article (ACCA's overview of the Employment (Amendment) Act 2022, checked in October 2026). This guide walks through each entitlement as it applies to a hair salon team: the annual leave ladder, the two separate sick leave pots, the 11 paid public holidays and the replacement-day mechanics, maternity and paternity leave, and the lighter rules for part-timers. Then the part no statute covers: the festive crunch, when every client wants a chair and every stylist wants the same week off. Leave only hurts when the appointment book does not know about it, which is why a free online booking page with per-stylist schedules and closure days is the cheapest leave-planning tool a salon owner has; we will be precise later about what it does and does not do.

Two scope notes before the detail. Everything below is Peninsular Malaysia: Sabah and Sarawak have their own Labour Ordinances, amended with effect from 1 May 2025 and broadly harmonised with the peninsula, but the wording and schedules differ, so East Malaysian salons must check their own Ordinance, not the Act (Human Resources Online on the Labour Ordinance (Amendment) Acts 2025, checked in October 2026). And these are minimums: a contract can always give more, and in a hiring market where good stylists have options, many do. This is orientation, not legal advice; for a contested case, the Labour Department (JTKSM) is the authority.

Annual leave: 8, 12 or 16 days, by length of service

Section 60E of the Employment Act sets paid annual leave by continuous service with you (PayrollPanda's leave entitlements guide, checked in October 2026):

Three practical rules ride along. In an incomplete year of service the entitlement is pro-rated to the completed months. Leave not taken within 12 months of the end of the year it was earned in is forfeited under the Act, so an informal "carry it forward forever" policy is generosity, not obligation; if you allow carry-forward, write down how much and until when. And the daily rate for a leave day is the ordinary rate of pay, which for a stylist on basic plus commission means the basic drives it unless your contract says otherwise: one more reason the commission clause in the contract matters, as covered in our guide to hiring a hairdresser in Malaysia, which also owns the EPF, SOCSO and wage maths this article deliberately skips.

Notice what the ladder does across a team. A salon with one stylist in year six, one in year three and a junior in year one owes 16, 12 and 8 days respectively: 36 chair-days a year that must disappear from the appointment book somewhere. That is not a problem, it is a planning constraint, and the festive section below is where it bites.

Sick leave: 14 to 22 days, plus a separate 60-day hospitalisation pot

Section 60F gives paid sick leave on the same service ladder: 14 days a year under 2 years of service, 18 days from 2 to less than 5 years, 22 days at 5 years or more. Since 1 January 2023 the old rule that capped everything at 60 days combined is gone: where hospitalisation is necessary, the employee is entitled to 60 days of paid hospitalisation leave in addition to the 14 to 22 outpatient days (Skrine's alert on the Employment (Amendment) Act 2022, checked in October 2026). A senior stylist who breaks a wrist and needs surgery can therefore be away on full pay for longer than older HR advice suggests; budget for it rather than being surprised by it.

The mechanics protect you too (P. E. Lim on sick leave under the Employment Act, checked in October 2026): sick leave must be certified by a registered medical practitioner, examination at the employer's expense if you appoint a panel doctor, and the employee must inform you within 48 hours of the start of the sick leave, failing which the Act deems the absence to be without permission. Put both points in the staff handbook: an MC photographed and sent on WhatsApp the same morning satisfies the spirit of the rule and lets you start calling the day's clients before they travel.

What a Saturday MC actually costs you is mostly rebooking logistics. A client database with each client's history and contact details, which is on ViteUneCoupe's free plan, turns "cancel the column" into twenty minutes of calls instead of an afternoon of detective work.

Public holidays: 11 paid days, 5 of them compulsory

Section 60D entitles every employee to 11 paid gazetted public holidays per calendar year, of which five are compulsory (Chia, Lee & Associates on section 60D, checked in October 2026):

• National Day (31 August)
• the Birthday of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong
• the Birthday of the Ruler or Yang di-Pertua Negeri of the state you trade in, or Federal Territory Day in KL, Putrajaya and Labuan
• Workers' Day (1 May)
• Malaysia Day (16 September)

You, the employer, choose the remaining six from the gazetted list and must tell the team at the start of the year. For a salon the choice is not neutral: pick the days your clientele actually disappears on. A salon in Ipoh with a largely Chinese clientele picks both Chinese New Year days; a salon in Kota Bharu picks around Raya. Make the choice deliberately in January, in writing, and the December argument about whether Deepavali "counts" never happens.

Two mechanics catch salon owners out. First, the replacement rule: if a gazetted paid holiday falls on a rest day, the next working day becomes the paid holiday (PayrollPanda, checked in October 2026). If your salon closes Mondays and a holiday lands on a stylist's Monday rest day, Tuesday becomes her paid holiday; the holiday does not quietly evaporate because the salon was shut anyway. Second, ad hoc holidays: the government can declare extra public holidays under the Holidays Act 1951 mid-year (a surprise sporting victory, an election), and the Act lets you grant another day in substitution; reserve that right in the contract so a sudden Tuesday holiday can become the following Monday instead of a cancelled column at 9pm notice.

Whether to open on a public holiday at all, and the premium that triggers, is its own calculation we keep to one sentence here: an employee at or under RM4,000 a month who works a paid public holiday is owed two extra days' wages at the ordinary rate on top of the holiday pay she already gets for that day, which roughly triples the day's labour cost and has its own revenue-versus-cost article on public holidays.

State holidays come on top, and they are not the same everywhere

The 11 paid days are the Employment Act floor; each state gazettes its own holidays on top, and they genuinely differ. Deepavali is a public holiday in almost every state but not in Sarawak, which gazettes Gawai Dayak and Good Friday instead (AJobThing on why Deepavali is not a Sarawak public holiday, checked in October 2026). Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu run a Friday-Saturday weekend, which moves where replacement days land. A state holiday you did not pick as one of your 11 is not automatically a paid day off under the Act, but check your state's rules and your own contracts before trading on one: in practice many salons simply close, because the clients are not coming anyway. The weekend geography and what it does to your peak days is covered in our guide to staff rostering for a Malaysian hair salon, which owns the 45-hour week, rest days and overtime this article leaves alone.

Maternity and paternity leave: the 2022 numbers

Two entitlements were upgraded by the 2022 amendments and still surprise owners working from older advice (Skrine, checked in October 2026):

• Maternity leave is 98 consecutive days, up from 60, under section 37. Eligibility for the maternity allowance requires employment during the 4 months before confinement and at least 90 days of employment in the 9 months before it; no allowance is payable if the employee already has five or more surviving children, though the leave itself remains.
• Paternity leave is 7 consecutive days at full pay, under section 60FA, for a married male employee, up to five confinements, provided he has been with you at least 12 months and told you about the pregnancy at least 30 days before the expected birth.

For a three-chair salon, 98 days is a third of a year of one column gone, so the moment a stylist tells you she is pregnant, start the cover plan: a part-timer for her peak days, her regulars gently redistributed across the team with her blessing, and her online booking schedule closed from the expected date so no client books a colour with a stylist who will be on leave.

Part-timers: pro-rated, not zero

The part-timer who covers your Saturdays has statutory leave too, under the Employment (Part-Time Employees) Regulations 2010 (official JTKSM copy; summary by Chia, Lee & Associates, checked in October 2026). A part-timer is someone working more than 30% but not more than 70% of a comparable full-timer's hours; against a 45-hour week that is roughly 14 to 31.5 hours. Her floors:

Below the 30% line the arrangement is casual and outside the Regulations; above 70% she is simply an employee with the full entitlements of this article, whatever the contract calls her. The definition is arithmetic, not a label.

The festive crunch: when everyone wants Raya week off

Here is the collision the statute does not solve. In the fortnight before Hari Raya Aidilfitri and Chinese New Year, a Malaysian salon does some of its best weeks of the year; then the country moves, clients balik kampung, and every stylist wants the same three or four days off, at exactly the moment the annual leave they are entitled to is theirs to request. A salon owner needs a system, decided in January, not an argument in March. What works:

• Publish the year's leave rules with the year's holiday choices. When you announce your six chosen holidays, announce the leave window rules too: how far ahead festive-week leave must be requested, how many stylists can be off at once, and how ties are broken.
• Decide the closure days first. Many salons simply close for the first day or two of Raya or CNY, because the compulsory and gazetted holidays cover part of it and the client demand on those exact days is near zero. A declared closure costs you nothing in goodwill and removes those days from the negotiation entirely.
• Rotate the prime slots year to year. If Aina got the full Raya week this year, Mei Ling gets first pick next year, and it is written down. First-come-first-served rewards whoever thinks about leave in January; rotation rewards nobody and angers nobody.
• Choose closure versus skeleton crew on data, not habit. Pull last year's takings for the in-between days (the third and fourth day of Raya, the week after CNY). If two chairs covered 90% of the demand, a skeleton crew of volunteers, with the rest on leave, beats both full closure and full staffing. Your appointment history is the only honest witness.
• Protect the pre-festive peak instead. The week before the holiday is where the money is; the week of the holiday is where the leave goes. Approving generous leave for the holiday week in exchange for all-hands availability the week before is a trade most teams accept gladly.

A fair system costs you nothing extra: the leave days were owed anyway. What it buys is a March without resignations.

Put the leave in the booking diary, not just the payroll file

Approved leave that only exists on a paper form fails at the worst moment: a client books a 2pm balayage online with a stylist who is in Kelantan that week. The fix is to treat the booking diary as the mirror of every approval. With ViteUneCoupe, staff schedules and closure days are on the free plan: block the stylist's approved leave on her schedule and her column simply shows no slots for those days, set a salon-wide closure for Raya and the whole diary shuts, and online bookings stay unlimited with 0% commission permanently, with RM prices as free text and +60 numbers handled normally in the client database.

To be equally clear about the limits: ViteUneCoupe is booking software, not HR software, so it does not count leave balances, store MCs or produce payslips. Reminders are by email only, never SMS or WhatsApp, on any plan, a real limitation in WhatsApp-first Malaysia; the workaround is the automatic email plus the client's own calendar alert, with a personal WhatsApp from the salon phone for regulars and known forgetters. It handles no money, so no deposits, no DuitNow or FPX, and no automatic cancellation charges. And the paid Standard plan, which adds confirmation and reminder emails and calendar sync from 29 € excluding tax a month with no commitment, is billed in euros, not ringgit, so the RM amount moves with the exchange rate and your card may add a small foreign-currency fee; the free plan involves no invoice in any currency, and for leave planning the free plan is the whole tool.

Frequently asked questions

How many days of annual leave does a hair salon employee get in Malaysia?

Under section 60E of the Employment Act 1955: 8 days a year for under 2 years of service, 12 days from 2 to less than 5 years, and 16 days at 5 years or more, pro-rated in an incomplete year. These are minimums; a contract can give more. Sabah and Sarawak salons follow their own Labour Ordinances, amended from 1 May 2025, not the Act.

Is hospitalisation leave on top of normal sick leave?

Yes, since 1 January 2023. The Employment (Amendment) Act 2022 deleted the old 60-day aggregate cap, so an employee gets 14, 18 or 22 days of outpatient sick leave by length of service, plus up to 60 days of paid hospitalisation leave where hospitalisation is necessary, as separate entitlements.

What happens when a public holiday falls on the salon's closed day?

If a paid gazetted holiday falls on an employee's rest day, the next working day becomes the paid holiday under section 60D. The holiday is not absorbed by the closure. For ad hoc holidays declared mid-year under the Holidays Act 1951, the employer may grant another day in substitution, which is worth reserving in the contract.

Do part-time salon staff get annual leave and public holidays?

Yes, pro-rated under the Employment (Part-Time Employees) Regulations 2010: 6 to 11 days of annual leave and 10 to 15 days of sick leave by length of service, and at least 7 gazetted public holidays including National Day, the Agong's birthday, the state Ruler's birthday or Federal Territory Day, and Workers' Day. The Regulations cover staff working more than 30% and up to 70% of full-time hours.

How long is maternity leave in Malaysia now?

98 consecutive days, since 1 January 2023, under section 37 of the Employment Act. The maternity allowance requires at least 90 days of employment in the 9 months before confinement and employment in the 4 months before it. Married male employees get 7 consecutive days of paid paternity leave, up to five confinements, after 12 months of service and with 30 days' notice of the pregnancy.