Severance Pay Calculator by Country

Every formula in it was taken from a primary source and is linked from the results: the Code du travail articles R1234-1, R1234-2, R1234-4, L1234-1 and L1234-9 for France; § 1a and § 23 of the Kündigungsschutzgesetz and § 622 BGB for Germany; sections 86, 155, 162 and 227 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 plus the 2026 increase-of-limits order for the UK; sections 230 and 235 of the Canada Labour Code and sections 57 and 64-65 of Ontario's Employment Standards Act, 2000 for Canada; 29 U.S.C. §§ 2101-2102 and Department of Labor guidance for the USA; and articles 53 and 56 plus transitional provision 11 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores for Spain. What it computes is the ordinary statutory minimum for an individual, non-union, standard termination. It is an estimate to orient yourself with, not legal advice, and it cannot see your contract.

Quite a lot, deliberately. It does not model collective agreements (conventions collectives, Tarifverträge, convenios colectivos, union contracts), which very often set higher figures than the statutory floor and are the single most common reason a real payout exceeds this estimate. It does not model common-law reasonable notice in Canada, which is frequently far larger than the statutory minimum and is what most wrongful-dismissal claims are actually about. It ignores collective-redundancy consultation duties, protected categories (pregnancy, disability, parental leave, works council and union representatives), dismissal for serious misconduct, resignation, retirement, the natural end of a fixed-term contract, seniority accrued across a business transfer, and all tax and social-security treatment of the payment. It also models only one province for Canada - Ontario - and only federal law for the United States.

Article R1234-2 of the Code du travail sets a two-tier floor: one quarter of a month's salary for each year of seniority up to ten years, then one third of a month for each year from the tenth onward. So twelve years of service is (10 × 1/4) + (2 × 1/3) = 3.17 months of salary. Article R1234-1 requires incomplete years to be counted proportionally by complete months, so the calculation is not rounded down to whole years. The salary used is the salaire de référence defined by article R1234-4: whichever is more favourable to you between the average of your last twelve months and one third of your last three months. Eight months of uninterrupted service with the same employer is the entry threshold (article L1234-9), and a convention collective can - and frequently does - set something better. This calculateur d'indemnité de licenciement shows each of those steps with your own figures filled in.

No, and this is the single most common misconception about German employment law. There is no general statutory right to an Abfindung. What exists is § 1a KSchG, which creates a conditional claim: if the employer dismisses you for urgent operational reasons and expressly writes in the dismissal letter that you can have the severance by letting the three-week deadline for a Kündigungsschutzklage pass, then you are entitled to half a month's earnings per year of employment, with any remainder of more than six months rounding up to a full year. You are, in effect, being paid to give up the right to challenge the dismissal. Outside that specific route, an Abfindungsrechner figure of 0.5 × years is what settlement negotiations customarily start from rather than something you can demand - and the Kündigungsschutzgesetz does not apply at all in establishments of ten or fewer employees, or in your first six months. What is genuinely guaranteed is the notice period in § 622 BGB, which scales from four weeks up to seven months at twenty years' service.

You need two years' continuous employment to qualify at all (ERA 1996 s.155). Beyond that, each full year of service is worth a different multiple of a week's pay depending on how old you were during that year: 1.5 weeks for a year worked while aged 41 or over, one week while aged 22 to 40, and half a week while under 22. Only the most recent 20 years count. The crucial detail people miss is the cap on 'a week's pay' - it is £751 from 6 April 2026 regardless of what you actually earn, which puts the ceiling on any statutory redundancy payment at £22,530. Statutory notice is separate and is not subject to that cap: one week per complete year of service, to a maximum of twelve weeks (s.86). Enhanced contractual redundancy schemes are common and pay on top of all this.

Because it changes which law applies entirely, and it depends on your industry rather than where you live. The Canada Labour Code governs only federally-regulated sectors - banks, airlines, railways, telecommunications, broadcasting, interprovincial trucking and a few others - which is around 6% of Canadian employment. Under it you get graduated notice of two to eight weeks (s.230) plus a separate severance entitlement of the greater of two days' wages per completed year and five days' wages (s.235). Everyone else is covered by their province's employment standards legislation. For a severance pay calculator in Ontario, Canada the relevant rules are ESA s.57 for notice (one week per year to a maximum of eight) and ss.64-65 for severance pay, which is an additional entitlement of one week per year up to 26 weeks but only where you have five or more years of service and your employer's global payroll is at least CAD 2.5 million. And in either case, statutory minimums are usually well below common-law reasonable notice, which is what a wrongful-dismissal claim pursues.

No. Everything this calculator produces is a statutory floor, not a target - it can be improved on but not undercut, and a contract clause purporting to pay below the statutory minimum is unenforceable in every one of these systems. The realistic risk runs the other way: accepting a statutory-minimum offer when you were entitled to considerably more. That happens routinely in Canada, where common-law reasonable notice often dwarfs the employment-standards minimum, and in France, Germany and Spain, where a collective agreement may set a much better formula than the legal floor. A severance offer is also usually a package in exchange for signing a release of claims, and that package is negotiable. Use this estimate as a floor to measure an offer against, then have the specifics checked by an employment lawyer in your jurisdiction.