Holiday entitlement calculator
Work out your statutory holiday in days or hours: 5.6 weeks a year, what you get when you start or leave part way through the year, and 12.07% for irregular hours.
- Your statutory holiday a year for 3 days a week
- 16.8 days
5.6 weeks × 3 days a week is 16.8 days a year.
This is the legal minimum. Your employer can include bank holidays in it and can give you more. Use irregular hours if your hours change from one pay period to the next or you have unpaid weeks off, such as term-time work; the 12.07% rule applies to leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. Rules and rounding follow GOV.UK’s holiday entitlement guidance and its calculator.
5.6 weeks, up to 28 days
Almost everyone who works is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year. On a 5-day week that’s 28 days, which is also the most statutory holiday anyone gets, so 6 days a week still gives 28. Part-time staff get 5.6 times the days they work: 3 days a week is 16.8 days.
Bank holidays don’t have to be extra. Your employer can count them as part of the 28 days, and many contracts give more than the minimum.
Starting or leaving part way through the year
If you start part way through the leave year, you get a twelfth of the year’s holiday for each month left, counting the month you start, rounded up to the nearest half day. In GOV.UK’s example, someone on 28 days who starts on 13 January gets 2.5 days for January: 28 ÷ 12 is 2.33, rounded up.
If you leave, you’re entitled to the share of the leave year you worked, counted in calendar days. Your employer must pay you for statutory holiday you haven’t taken, even if you’re dismissed for gross misconduct. If you’ve taken more than your share, they can only take money back from your final pay if you agreed to that in writing beforehand.
Irregular hours and part-year work
If your hours change from one pay period to the next, or you have unpaid weeks off, such as term-time work, holiday builds up at 12.07% of the hours you work in each pay period, rounded to the nearest hour. In the Department for Business and Trade’s example, 68 hours worked in June earns 8 hours of holiday. The 12.07% is 5.6 weeks of holiday spread across the other 46.4 weeks of the year. It applies to leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024.
How the answers are rounded
The rules come from GOV.UK’s holiday entitlement guidance, and the rounding follows GOV.UK’s own holiday calculator, so the answers match it. The Department for Business and Trade’s guidance rounds a leaver’s share to the nearest tenth instead, so its example of 7.1 days shows here as 7.2.
Sources
- Holiday entitlement, GOV.UK
- Calculate holiday entitlement, GOV.UK
- Holiday pay and entitlement reforms from 1 January 2024, Department for Business and Trade