🇲🇼 Malawi: Managing Annual Leave Accruals

We’d like to highlight an important employment compliance consideration in Malawi related to annual leave accruals and termination payouts.

Under Malawi labor law:

• Annual leave does not expire and cannot be forfeited

• There is no legal cap on leave accumulation

• Any unused leave must be paid out upon termination

As a result, unused leave balances can continue accumulating over time and may create significant financial liability if not proactively managed.

Recommended best practices

To help reduce operational and financial risk, we recommend that clients:

• Implement structured leave planning processes instead of relying only on ad hoc requests

• Review employee leave balances regularly (monthly or quarterly)

• Encourage managers to actively monitor and promote leave usage

• Address high accrued balances early before they become difficult to manage

Planning ahead for terminations

We also strongly recommend informing RemoFirst as early as possible when a termination is being considered in Malawi. This allows our team to review outstanding leave balances in advance and help assess any potential payout obligations before the offboarding process begins.

If you have any questions about leave management practices in Malawi, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or our Support team.