Terminating employment in the Czech Republic

Czech employment can end in five ways and no others. A dohoda o rozvázání pracovního poměru, a written agreement between the parties, ends it on the agreed day under § 49. A výpověď, written notice, ends it after a notice period under § 50. Okamžité zrušení, summary termination, ends it at once on narrow grounds under §§ 55 and 56. Zrušení ve zkušební době ends it during probation under § 66. And a fixed-term contract expires under § 65.

The difference between the first two routes is where most of the cost sits. An employee may give notice for any reason or none. An employer may give notice only on one of the grounds listed in § 52, and that list is exhaustive. There is no general power to dismiss because the relationship is not working out.

The agreement route stays open, and it is the one most foreign employers reach for, but a condition travels with it. Where the agreement is made for one of the grounds in § 52 písm. a) to c) or e), severance is payable exactly as if notice had been given. A redundancy cannot be made cheaper by presenting it as a mutual parting. The agreement must be in writing and each party must receive a copy.

Summary termination is narrower than foreign employers expect. An employer may use it only where the employee has been finally convicted of a deliberate criminal offence and given an unconditional prison term, or has breached a duty relating to their work in a particularly gross manner. An employee has their own summary route, chiefly where pay is more than 15 days late.

§ 52 zákoníku práce lists eight grounds, and an employer’s notice must rest on one of them. The first three are organisational: the employer or a part of it is being wound up; the employer or a part of it is relocating; or the employee has become redundant, nadbytečný, as a result of a decision on a change of tasks, technical equipment, a reduction in headcount to raise efficiency, or another organisational change.

The next two are health and exposure grounds: a long-term loss of the capacity to do the current work, established on a medical opinion from the occupational-health provider or on a reviewing administrative decision, and reaching the maximum permissible exposure at a workplace determined by the public-health authority.

The last three are performance and conduct. Ground f) covers an employee who does not meet the statutory prerequisites for the work, or who, without fault on the employer’s part, does not meet the requirements for proper performance. Where the failure consists of unsatisfactory work results, notice is available only if the employer has called on the employee in writing to remedy them within the last 12 months and the employee has not done so in a reasonable time. Ground g) covers a serious breach of duties, with persistent less serious breaches usable only after a written warning in the previous six months. Ground h) covers a particularly gross breach of the duty to observe the sickness regime while temporarily unfit for work.

Three procedural rules bite hard on foreign employers. The notice must state the ground factually, in a way that cannot be confused with another ground, and the ground may not be changed afterwards. Notice can be withdrawn only with the other party’s consent, and both the withdrawal and the consent must be in writing. And any notice must be discussed with the trade union in advance; for a member of a union body operating at the employer, the employer must ask for prior consent, and a refusal makes the termination invalid unless a court decides the employer cannot fairly be required to keep employing the person.

Disciplinary grounds also run on a clock: notice on ground g) must come within three months of the employer learning of the ground.

Notice runs from the day it is delivered. § 51 odst. 1 zákoníku práce provides that the výpovědní doba begins on the day the notice was delivered to the other party and ends on the day of the final month bearing the same number; where that month has no such day, it ends on the last day of the month. A two-month notice delivered on 10 March therefore ends on 10 May.

This changed on 1 June 2025, with the amendment known as the flexinovela, zákon č. 120/2025 Sb. Until then the notice period began on the first day of the calendar month following delivery, which in practice stretched a two-month notice towards three. Any page still saying that Czech notice runs from the first of the following month is describing the position before June 2025, and it is the single most repeated stale fact about Czech employment.

The lengths themselves are statutory minimums. Notice from the employee, for any reason or none, is two months. Notice from the employer on grounds a) to e) is two months. Notice from the employer on the performance and conduct grounds f), g) and h) is one month. An employee resigning because of a transfer of undertaking under § 51a has a shorter period of 15 days, or until the day before the transfer takes effect.

The period can be extended by written agreement, and the way it runs can be varied the same way, but it must be the same for employer and employee. The one exception is the one-month notice on grounds f) to h), where asymmetry is permitted. How this compares with at-will employment in the United States is a separate subject, and our guide to US and Czech termination rules takes it up.

Severance, odstupné, is due on employer’s notice on § 52 písm. a), b) or c), and on an agreement made for those same grounds. It is expressed as a multiple of average monthly earnings, and it caps at three.

The scale is short. Less than one year of employment with that employer gives one times average monthly earnings. At least one year and less than two gives two times. At least two years gives three times, and that is the ceiling. A three-year employee and a twenty-year employee receive the same amount. Where employment ends while the employee is subject to the working-time-account procedure under § 86 odst. 4, three times is payable in addition to the amount from the scale.

One ground sits outside the scale entirely. Notice on § 52 písm. e), reaching the maximum permissible exposure at the workplace, carries twelve times average monthly earnings.

The mechanics matter as much as the multiple. Earlier employment with the same employer counts towards the service test where the gap between the two periods did not exceed six months. Severance is paid at the next regular pay date after the employment ends, unless a written agreement puts it on the last day or later. If the employee returns to the same employer before the number of months covered by the severance has elapsed, they repay it, or a proportionate part calculated by calendar days. Severance is excluded from the health-insurance assessment base.

Where several people go at once, collective redundancy adds a further procedure: written information to the trade union and to the regional branch of the Úřad práce at least 30 days in advance, and negotiation on limiting the redundancies.

Some employees cannot be given notice while a protected period, ochranná doba, is running. § 53 covers temporary incapacity for work or quarantine, military exercise or operational deployment, long-term release for public office, pregnancy, maternity leave, paternity leave and parental leave, temporary unfitness for night work established on an occupational-health opinion, and periods when the employee is providing long-term care or caring for a child under 10 under the sickness insurance rules.

The protection also stretches a notice already given. Where notice was delivered before the protected period began, and the notice period would otherwise expire during it, the protected period does not count towards the notice. The employment ends once the remainder of the notice period has run after the protection ends, unless the employee states that they do not insist on the extension.

Carve-outs sit in § 54. The ban does not apply where the employer is being wound up, and it applies in a limited way on relocation, with protection kept for pregnant employees and those on maternity, paternity or parental leave. Grounds justifying summary termination, and the serious-breach grounds g) and h), are also carved out, again with that group protected. Summary termination is barred outright against a pregnant employee and against an employee on maternity, paternity or parental leave.

Probation carries a narrow protection of its own. Ending employment in probation is otherwise open to both sides without a reason, but an employer cannot use it against someone who is in the first 14 calendar days of temporary incapacity for work or quarantine. What the employer pays across those same 14 days, and what ČSSZ pays afterwards, is set out in our guide to Czech sick pay rules for 2026.

A termination can be challenged in court within two months, counted from the day on which the employment should have ended by that termination. § 72 zákoníku práce applies the same deadline to all four modes: notice, summary termination, termination in probation and termination by agreement. It binds employer and employee alike, and it is preclusive, so a claim brought late cannot be heard at all.

Two months sounds short. The exposure behind it is not. Where the termination is found invalid and the employee has notified the employer in writing that they insist on continued employment, the employment never ended. The employer owes compensation at average earnings, plus leave, from the date of that notification until it lets the employee work again or the employment validly ends. Where the total runs beyond six months, the court may reduce the compensation for the further period on the employer’s application, taking account of whether the employee worked elsewhere and what they earned.

Where the employee gives no such notification, the relationship is treated as having ended by agreement: on expiry of the notice period for an invalid notice, or on the day the termination purported to take effect for an invalid summary or probation termination, with compensation at average earnings for the notice period in those two cases.

That is the practical reason to get a Czech exit right the first time. The written ground, the delivery date, the protected-period check, the union discussion and the severance calculation are each capable of undoing the termination on their own. The consolidated text of the zákoník práce is published at zakonyprolidi.cz, and the flexinovela changes are summarised by MPSV at mpsv.gov.cz.

Where you have no Czech entity, our own Czech company is the employer and holds the employment file, so the notice, the delivery record and the odstupné calculation are ours to produce and yours to decide on. How the relationship starts, and what has to be in the contract, is covered in our guide to Czech employment contracts. For the wider picture, see Employer of Record Czech Republic.