Luxembourg Construction Congé Collectif: Winter Closure 2026/2027 Explained

Who Must Stop Work During the Luxembourg Congé Collectif

Luxembourg's building and civil engineering sector is subject to a mandatory collective leave period (congé collectif), set out in Annex V of the sector's collective bargaining agreement. Companies holding establishment authorizations for trades including general construction, road and paving works, screed laying, earthworks and excavation, asphalt and bitumen work, joint sealing, reinforcement steel fixing, and drilling and anchoring are, in principle, covered by this closure. When a company holds several establishment authorizations that would normally fall under different collective agreements, the applicable rule depends on whether its activities are organized into clearly separated divisions: separated divisions each follow the collective agreement matching their own activity, while a company without such separation follows the agreement of its main activity.

The 2026/2027 Winter Closure: 19 December to 6 January

For the 2026/2027 winter period, the mandatory collective closure for building and civil engineering companies runs from Saturday, 19 December 2026, to Wednesday, 6 January 2027, inclusive. This follows the same type of structure used for the 2026 summer closure, which ran from Friday, 31 July 2026 to Sunday, 23 August 2026, although the winter and summer periods are each set separately.

How the 10 Working Days Plus Public Holidays Are Counted

The winter closure is built from 10 working days, to which the legal public holidays of 25 and 26 December and 1 January are added. Job seekers checking a construction employer's calendar should expect the published winter closure to combine these 10 working days with the surrounding public holidays, which is why the overall closure covers the period described above.

Exemptions: When Companies Can Keep Working

Exemptions from the mandatory collective closure are handled by an ad hoc commission for the building and civil engineering sector, the only body authorized to grant them. Work that can justify an exemption includes repair work in schools, repair work in factories during a production stoppage, and urgent work recognized by the commission. Every company working on a site during the closure, including subcontractors, must apply for its own exemption. Applications must be filed 2 months before the official start of the collective closure, sent to the Labour and Mines Inspectorate acting as secretariat for the ad hoc commission, with a copy to the OGB-L and LCGB unions. They must include the opinion of the staff delegation, or of the employees concerned if there is no delegation, and must specify the number of volunteer employees involved, the site, and the start and duration of the works. A delay in a client's order is not accepted as grounds for an "urgent" exemption, and the commission will no longer accept late applications attributed to such delays.

For scale, during the 2026 summer closure the ad hoc commission reported 212 exemption requests submitted by 23 July 2026, of which 160 came from building and civil engineering companies; of those, the commission issued 147 approvals and 13 refusals. Around 750 employees were covered by the requests that were granted. A further 42 requests came from companies outside both the building and civil engineering sector and the sanitary, heating and air conditioning sector, so they were not subject to a mandatory collective closure in the first place. These figures relate to the summer 2026 closure rather than the winter one, but they show how the exemption process works in practice.

A Different Calendar for Sanitary, Heating and Air-Conditioning Installers

Companies holding an establishment authorization as a heating-sanitary installer follow their own collective bargaining agreement, with a mandatory collective leave of 15 days including the 15 August public holiday, starting on the first Monday of August. For 2026, this ran from Monday, 3 August 2026 to Sunday, 23 August 2026, a different start date from the building and civil engineering sector's 31 July 2026 start. Refrigeration installation companies are not subject to this mandatory collective closure at all; instead, their employees are entitled to 15 consecutive days of leave between May and October, organized through an internal rotation agreed with the staff delegation or the employees concerned. Exemptions for heating, sanitary and air conditioning companies cover breakdown repairs, maintenance and repair work, and require the agreement of the staff delegation and the employees involved rather than approval from the ad hoc commission that handles building and civil engineering requests. During the 2026 summer closure, 10 such requests were recorded for this sector, though the authorities have clarified that neither the Labour and Mines Inspectorate nor the ad hoc commission has the power to grant approvals for it.