Resignation Letter Format for Both Sides of the Exit

Most sample resignation letters online cover the employee's side only. The disputes start with what the employer sends back.

Start with the notice period, because it is the number everyone argues over and no labour Code sets it. It comes from the appointment letter or contract. In an establishment of 300 or more workers, certified standing orders can speak to it too, but the Model Standing Orders' own notice clause is the employer's one month for a permanent worker, not the worker's. So a resignation letter with notice period should quote the clause it relies on, and the employer's reply should quote the same one.

Then the money. Section 17(2) of the Code on Wages says an employee who has resigned must be paid the wages due within two working days of the resignation, and the employee there has no wage ceiling, so it reaches managers too. For a worker (the OSH Code's word, which leaves out managers, administrators and supervisors on over ₹18,000 a month) in an establishment of ten or more workers, s.32(1)(vi) of the OSH Code adds wages for leave earned and not taken, paid before the end of the second working day after quitting. Where the gratuity Chapter applies (any factory or mine, or any shop or establishment with ten or more employees on any day of the last twelve months), gratuity follows at five years of continuous service, worked out and paid within thirty days without waiting for an application.

What does not follow is a deduction for the notice they did not serve. Recovering an unserved notice period is not one of the deductions section 18(2) of the Code on Wages allows, so it cannot come out of the final settlement, whatever the appointment letter says. Gratuity cannot absorb it either: forfeiture under s.53(6) needs a termination for one of the grounds it lists, such as damage to the employer's property, violence or an offence involving moral turpitude, and a resignation, even on short notice, is none of them. Getting it wrong has a price: paying an employee less than is due is a fine of up to ₹50,000 under s.54(1)(a), and the claims authority may order compensation up to ten times the amount it determines (s.45(2)). On our reading a late settlement falls under s.54(1)(c), up to ₹20,000. Gratuity paid late carries simple interest from the day it fell due (Code on Social Security, s.56(4)).

The same pack serves a plant losing a line supervisor, a corporate office replacing an analyst and a hospital covering a nurse's shifts: the letters change, the clocks do not.