Voluntary resignation in Peru: the 30-day notice and how to ask to be excused from it

The 30-day notice period

Resigning is a decision you make on your own, without needing your employer’s signature — unlike a mutual-agreement termination, which requires both sides to agree. Article 16 of D.S. 003-97-TR confirms this: the list of causes for ending an employment contract places “the worker’s resignation or voluntary withdrawal” in subsection b), as a cause distinct and separate from “mutual agreement between worker and employer” in subsection d).

What the law does require is advance notice. Article 18 is direct: “the worker must give written notice 30 days in advance.” Those 30 days run from when you submit your letter, not from when the company “accepts” your resignation — a resignation doesn’t need acceptance to be valid, only the notice.

How being excused from the notice period works

Here’s the detail that matters most to a worker who needs to leave sooner: that same Article 18 lets the employer excuse you from that period in two ways.

On the employer’s own initiative. The company can decide, without you asking, that you don’t need to work out the 30 days.

At your request. If you expressly ask for it — normally in the resignation letter itself — the law puts the burden on the employer: “the request will be considered accepted if it is not rejected in writing within the third day.” In other words, if you ask for the waiver and the company doesn’t respond in writing rejecting it within those three days, your request is accepted by the mere passage of time. The employer’s silence works in your favor here — but only when you’re the one who requested the waiver; if you’re just hoping the company excuses you on its own without having asked, there’s no silence deadline automatically working in your favor.

How it differs from a mutual-agreement termination

Resignation and a mutual-agreement termination end in the same result — you no longer work there — but they’re two distinct legal paths, with a different degree of control over what you end up signing. Resignation is your unilateral decision: it doesn’t need the company’s agreement, only that you give notice. A mutual-agreement termination, by contrast, is a bilateral agreement that only exists if both sides sign it, and that’s exactly why it can be misused by a company to disguise what’s really a departure forced by the company itself.

If you’re handed a “mutual agreement” document but the decision to end the relationship was really the company’s — not yours — it’s worth reviewing it carefully before signing.

What happens to your CTS, bonuses, and vacation pay

Resigning doesn’t make you lose the benefits you already earned. Your CTS, prorated bonuses, and prorated vacation pay are calculated based on the time you actually worked up to your last day, regardless of whether the decision to leave was yours. Those calculations follow their own specific rules, which we don’t repeat here.

If your departure wasn’t really voluntary

Not every signed resignation is a free one. If you left your job because your employer subjected you to hostile conduct — mistreatment, arbitrary changes to your working conditions, sustained pressure to leave — that may be a different legal category from a simple resignation, with different consequences for you. It’s worth identifying which situation you’re actually in before assuming what you signed was an ordinary voluntary resignation.