UK holiday entitlement and annual leave calculator

Part-time workers get the same 5.6 weeks of paid holiday as full-time workers, based on the days or hours they actually work. Multiply the days you work each week by 5.6: 3 days a week gives 16.8 days and 4 days a week gives 22.4 days. If your hours vary from week to week, work in hours instead, or use the 12.07% method if you are an irregular hours or part-year worker in a leave year that started on or after 1 April 2024.

You are entitled to the holiday you have built up in the leave year so far: your full-year entitlement multiplied by the fraction of the leave year you were employed. Your employer must pay you for any statutory holiday you have built up but not taken when you leave (regulation 14). If you have taken more holiday than you built up, your employer cannot take money from your final pay unless you agreed to this in writing beforehand, for example in your contract.

They can be. There is no legal right to paid time off on bank holidays, and your employer can count them as part of your 5.6 weeks. Your contract says which applies. For a full-time worker in England and Wales, where there are usually 8 bank holidays a year, 28 days including bank holidays means 20 days to book plus 8 bank holidays. Scotland usually has 9 bank holidays and Northern Ireland 10.

Your contract says how much unused holiday you can carry over. If you get 28 days, you can carry over up to 8 days, and any holiday above 28 days can be carried over if your employer allows it. If family-related leave, such as maternity or parental leave, stopped you taking your holiday, you can carry the untaken leave into the next year. If sickness stopped you, you can carry over up to 20 of your 28 days if you work regular hours all year, or up to 28 days if you work irregular hours or part of the year. You can carry over your whole entitlement if your employer did not give you a reasonable chance to take it, did not tell you it would be lost at the end of the leave year, or did not pay rolled-up holiday pay you were entitled to.

For irregular hours workers and part-year workers, holiday for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024 builds up at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period, rounded to the nearest whole hour. The figure comes from 5.6 weeks of holiday divided by the 46.4 weeks a year left for working (52 minus 5.6): 5.6 / 46.4 = 12.07%. For these workers, employers may also pay rolled-up holiday pay, an extra 12.07% of pay on each payslip, instead of paying holiday when it is taken.

Workers are entitled to a week's pay for each week of statutory holiday they take. With regular hours and fixed pay, a week's pay is your normal pay for a week. With irregular hours or part-year work, it is your average pay per week over the last 52 weeks in which you were paid, counting back up to 104 weeks to find 52 paid weeks, or the average of the full weeks you have worked if you have been paid for fewer than 52. Normal pay includes commission and regular overtime but does not usually include bonuses. For regular-hours workers, at least 4 weeks of statutory holiday must be paid at the normal rate and the remaining 1.6 weeks at the basic rate.

Rolled-up holiday pay means paying for holiday as an extra amount on top of your pay for work done, instead of when you take the holiday. It is only allowed for irregular hours workers and part-year workers, for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. The uplift is 12.07% of your pay for work done in the pay period and is paid at the same time as that pay, so pay of £1,000 gives £120.70 of holiday pay. Employers cannot use rolled-up holiday pay for workers with regular hours.

The law does not require your employer to round a pro rata annual entitlement. Many employers round up to the nearest half day or whole day, which is allowed because it gives you more than the minimum. Rounding down is not allowed, because it would leave you with less than your statutory entitlement. Irregular hours and part-year workers are different: the law rounds the holiday built up in each pay period to the nearest whole hour, so less than 30 minutes counts as zero and 30 minutes or more counts as a full hour.

Yes. Workers on zero-hours contracts are entitled to statutory paid holiday like other workers. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, most zero-hours workers count as irregular hours workers, so their holiday builds up at 12.07% of the hours they work in each pay period.

Holiday still builds up while you are off sick. If you are ill during your holiday you can take the time as sick leave instead, following your employer's sickness reporting rules. If sickness means you cannot take your holiday in the leave year, you can carry over up to 20 of your 28 days (up to 28 days for irregular hours and part-year workers), to be used within 18 months of the end of the leave year it came from.