Holiday entitlement for employees

2 months, 3 weeks ago by Oliver Atkinson

All employees are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks of holiday pay. This includes those working irregular hours, zero-hour contracts, as well as agency workers. Whilst 5.6 weeks will equal 28 days holiday for full time workers, for part time workers it will be less.

Full-time salaried employees:

For full time employees, on a salary, the entitlement will be 28 days per year. This can include bank holidays. Since there are usually 8 bank holidays per year, an employee would have 20 days of holiday plus the bank holidays.

Statutory holiday entitlement is capped at 28 days, so employees working 6 days a week are still only legally entitled to 28 days of holiday (although employers can always give more).

Salary part time:

In order to work out the holiday entitlement for an employee who works part time, but is on a salary, we need to multiply the number of days they work in a week by 5.6. For example, someone working 2 days per week will get 11.2 days (2*5.6). Employers cannot round down the number of holidays an employee is owed, but they can round it up, so an employee entitled to 11.2 days might be able to take 11.5.

Issues may arise when part-time employees do not work on days which would typically be a bank holiday. So as not to treat these employees unfairly they should be offered the pro-rata amount of bank holidays.

Irregular hours / zero-hour contracts:

Zero-hour contract employees are also entitled to the 5.6 weeks of holiday, as they have the same legal rights as employees on other contracts.

In this instance, we work out their holiday entitlement by multiplying the number of hours worked by 0.1207. This figure is used, as 5.6 weeks amount to 12.07% of all hours that an employee could work.

From the 1st of April 2024 employers can now use the
rolled-up holiday pay method for part-time and irregular hour workers. With this method, employees will receive their holiday allowance on top of their wage each time they are paid, rather than when they take holidays. This method should still use the 12.07% calculation.

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