Federal Foreign Office grants overseas officials up to 18 additional vacation days

The Federal Foreign Office will in future grant officials of the Foreign Service at foreign posts up to 18 additional days of leave per year. The General Administrative Regulation of September 16, 2026, was published on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, in the Federal Gazette under the official reference BAnz AT 14.10.2026 B1. It will enter into force on January 1, 2027.

The legal basis is Section 18, Paragraph 2, Sentence 2 of the Foreign Service Act; the Federal Foreign Office is acting in agreement with the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The regulation uses a table to determine the number of additional leave days for each foreign post, staggered according to the hardship of the location. In total, the announcement lists 175 posts across five regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Oceania, and Europe. The range spans from 3 to 18 days.

Up to 18 days at particularly stressful locations

The highest level of 18 additional leave days applies, among others, to:

• Kyiv, Khartoum, and Tripoli
• Kabul, Baghdad, Damascus, Sanaa, Pyongyang, and Yangon
• Minsk, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Astana, Almaty, and Ashgabat
• Bamako, Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, N’Djamena, Niamey, Nouakchott, and Ouagadougou
• Caracas, La Paz, Port-au-Prince, and Tegucigalpa

Nine days for Cape Town, Pretoria, and Rabat

The supplement is significantly lower at comparatively safe locations. According to the table, 9 additional leave days each are granted to:

• Cape Town, Pretoria, Rabat, and Tunis
• Bogotá, Brasilia, Montevideo, San José, Santiago de Chile, and Amman
• Doha, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Osaka-Kobe, Seoul, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo
• Chisinau and St. Petersburg

The lowest level: three days

At the lower end of the scale are posts with only 3 additional leave days. These include:

• Chicago, Houston, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington
• Singapore, Canberra, Athens, Wrocław, Budapest, Gdańsk, Kraków, Malaga, Marseille, Reykjavik, Riga, Warsaw, and Zagreb

Intermediate levels of 6, 12, and 15 days cover the remaining locations, such as Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Sydney, and Wellington with 6 days, as well as Accra, Cairo, Nairobi, and Beijing with 15 days.

Entry into force and signature

The administrative regulation was signed on September 16, 2026, in Berlin; the execution was carried out “By order” by Gebauer. It enters into force on January 1, 2027. The PDF version of the official publication is provided with a qualified electronic seal.

For employees of the Foreign Service, the regulation means a predictable, location-based reduction in workload: those deployed to hardship posts such as Kyiv, Khartoum, or Tripoli can henceforth claim up to 18 additional vacation days per year, while posts in Western Europe and North America are set at 3 days. The grading makes the differing security and living conditions at the 175 posts listed in the table transparent for the first time in a uniform overview.

Source: Bundesanzeiger, BAnz AT 14.10.2026 B1 of October 14, 2026, Announcement, pp. 1–5 (official reference: BAnz AT 14.10.2026 B1).