Legal Holiday Entitlement Support for Employers

It’s important that you’re clued up about holiday entitlement and how it differs between your employees. Holidays are based on your employee’s hours and are outlined in their contracts. You may have a range of full-time and part-time workers and calculating their varying holiday entitlement can seem a bit overwhelming to manage.

If holidays are giving you a headache, then we’re here to relieve you of your stress. We’ll help you through every step of managing annual leave so your business runs smoothly.

We’ll provide you access to a holiday management tool on our online platform, Atlas. Here, you’ll be able to properly manage team holidays to fit your business. From requesting and approving holidays seamlessly online, to team overviews and reports, it’s the perfect way to use smart tech to relieve your holiday headaches!

How to work out holiday entitlement

Statutory entitlement means that almost all ‘workers’ are entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday per year.

• Full-time workers who work a standard 5-day week, are entitled to 28 days’ paid annual leave per year.
• Part-time employees are also entitled to 5.6 weeks holiday but based on their regular working pattern. For example, if an employee works three days a week, they would be entitled to 16.8 day’s annual leave each year.

Equation: 28 days x 3/5 = 16.8 days

(the annual holiday entitlement) x (the number of days they work against full-time employees).

You can read more on how to calculate annual leave by reading our guide on holiday time.

What about ‘part-year’ staff?

This means a permanent employee who only works for part of the year. Most often this applies to people who work in schools as ‘term-time only’ employees like cleaners, caretakers and holiday club staff. These employees also receive 5.6 weeks’ holiday each year even if they only work during term-time.

Bank holiday entitlement

You’re not legally required to give employees bank or public holidays as paid leave. Should you wish to though, you can include them in employees’ statutory annual leave – it’s entirely up to you.

Extra leave

You can authorise more than the legal minimum of 5.6 weeks holiday if you wish to. This is an attractive perk for many.

Holiday accrual

Legally, there’s no such thing as ‘accruing’ holidays anymore, but the term ’holiday accrual’ is still used. This relates to when an employee starts with the business. If they join you at the beginning of your holiday year, they’re automatically entitled to full annual leave.

For example, if they join three months into your holiday year, they would only be entitled to the remaining three quarters worth of holiday for the year.

You can put conditions in place that restrict the taking of holiday entitlement during an employee’s first year of employment. This reduces the risk of new employees taking a chunk of holiday entitlement at once and leaving the business shortly after. The restriction would limit employees to 1/12th of the full annual leave entitlement for each month of service.

Requesting leave

You can determine your own rules around the notice period needed to request leave by outlining these conditions in employee’s contracts.

If you don’t have your own procedure in place, it’s important that you still receive enough notice. Employees should give you at least double the length of time in notice they would like off. So for 1 day’s annual leave it would be 2 days’ notice. For example, if an employee would like two weeks off, they must request this four weeks before their leave date.

This also applies when answering your employee’s request. So, you’d have to accept or reject a request two weeks before an employee takes two weeks off.

How we can help

If you need help taking the hassle out of holidays, then you’re in the right place. Our HR Consultants and Employment Law experts know holiday entitlements like the back of their hand. They’ll be working around the clock if you want to give them a call on our advice line.

Better yet, Citation clients get access to our online holiday management tool in Atlas. With this, you can manage and view everyone’s holidays in one, simple, online location.

For more information on how we can help you, get in touch with the team by filling in the form opposite and we’ll give you a call and discuss how we can partner with you and get the ball rolling.