Use this holiday entitlement calculator to work out employee holiday allowances
The holiday entitlement for 2023 is
28.00 days
For the full year.
Stop wasting time working out holiday entitlement yourself
With Charlie, your whole team’s holiday allowance is calculated automatically. Set it up once, then never touch it again.
Use this holiday pay calculator to work out whether an employee is owed holiday pay when they leave your company
13.00 days of unused holiday, equivalent to
Payment in lieu of notice (PILON) £1000.00
For the full year.
Spending too much time on HR admin?
With Charlie, you can automate manual HR tasks and get tricky calculations done for you. Set it up once, then never touch it again.
Holiday entitlement calculation – all you need to know
How many holidays are you entitled to in the UK?
Employees are entitled to 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday entitlement in the UK, which is equal to 28 days of paid leave if they work at least 5 days a week.
5-day week = 5
Annual holiday entitlement = 5.65 x 5.6 = 28 days
As the employer you can choose to include bank holidays in the total or have them on top. Many employers choose to offer more than 5.6 weeks, but that’s the UK minimum annual leave everyone should get regardless of contract type.
The entitlement can however be different if a team member:
- Works part-time – the holiday entitlement will depend on their working patterns (how many working days they have each week).
- Do shift work or are a term-time worker – for someone working irregular hours, time off is calculated on the number of hours rather than the number of days.
Note that team members who work more than five days a week are still only entitled to the statutory leave limit of 28 days (this is known as statutory leave cap) unless their employer states otherwise.
A time off process that runs itself
Charlie does tricky annual leave calculations for you, for total peace of mind.
How do you calculate holiday pro rata?
Although it’s easier to use the calculator above to work out holiday entitlement and do pro rata, we’ll let you in on how the calculator works if you want to do it on your own.
Calculating holiday entitlement for a team member starting halfway through the year
Let’s say one of your team members joins the company in the middle of the year (June if your leave year runs from January to December) – that means you’ll have to let them know how many holidays they’ve got left for the rest of the year.
Simply work out how many holidays they’ll accrue until the end of the year. Each month, your team member should get roughly around 2.3 days of holidays, which means that in this case, with 5 months left until the end of the year, they would get 13.8 days (2.3 x 6).
According to UK employment law, you’ll need to round up the number, which means they’ll get 14 days.
However, that’s only a rough calculation, and considering most of your team members will start part-way through the year, you’ll want a more sustainable way of calculating their time off and making that information available to them.
That’s where you should look at automating your calculations. With Charlie’s HR software, for example, you can simply enter the start date for your team member and the system will prorate their holiday allowance for you.
Your team will get their time off information as soon as they join the company, having access to their holiday allowance and being able to request time off all in one place.
Calculating holiday entitlement for an employee leaving during the holiday year
Every time an employee leaves the company, you have to calculate their remaining holiday entitlement. It is important to get this right because failing to give them the remaining holiday they’re entitled to may result in legal action against your company.
You can use this formula to calculate leavers’ holiday entitlement:
Full annual holiday entitlement (in days) x months worked ÷ 12
For example, if you offer 28 days of holiday leave per year, and your team member is leaving on July 1st, it will be:
28 x 6 (months worked) ÷ 12 = 14 days of allowance remaining
N.B.: Remember that from this resulting number, you’ll need to deduce the number of holiday days they’ve already taken in your holiday year!
With annual leave management software like CharlieHR, you can save yourself the hassle of doing these calculations manually. Simply input your team member’s leaving date, and the system will prorate their remaining leave automatically.
Calculating holiday entitlement for a part-time employee
Part-time staff are entitled to the same amount of holiday as full time workers, but pro-rata. For example, if a team member works 4 days per week, the calculation would be the following: 4 x 5.6 (weeks of statutory leave) = 22.4.
In the UK, these holiday allowances must legally be rounded up (not down) to the nearest half day. So this would amount to 23 days’ allowance.
Automating holiday entitlement calculation for all team members
Using a calculator like this one is a pretty good solution when you don’t want to waste your time with spreadsheets (do you, for example, use a Google Sheets holiday tracker?).
However, it’s yet another tab you need to open every time you need to calculate holiday allowance for your team members, and then record the adequate amount somewhere else.
That’s where time off automation might come in handy to remove yourself from the manual process completely.
With HR software, allowances are calculated in one click, giving you the answer you need at the tip of your fingers.
With an HR tool like Charlie, you can also choose to manually adjust the amount of time off your team member gets – that can be really useful if they’re due any time in lieu or any carry over leave that’s not included in their normal allowance at the time they leave.
How do you calculate holiday pay for your team members?
This process – automated through our holiday pay calculator above – is really useful if you want to calculate how much a team member is owed when they leave your business.
This payment is called Payment in Lieu of Notice and allows you to pay your team members for their remaining holidays – which can be useful in case of redundancies or if you’re putting an end to someone’s probation and don’t require them to work for you anymore.
In terms of calculating annual leave, you can also find out how much annual leave is owed to team members in their notice period.
This calculator can also tell you if a team member has taken more than their remaining annual leave entitlement. It’s important to note that the procedure for dealing with this scenario should be outlined in an employee handbook or contract. Without this, the company cannot demand payment for leave taken.
In terms of how the calculation can be done manually, here are a few pieces of information you need to collect:
- Their start date and end date, to understand how much holiday they have accrued during that period depending on your company’s financial year and holiday allowance.
- Their salary, to work out how much they get paid daily and multiply it by the holidays they accrued.
- How many holidays they took so far, to deduct it from the holidays accrued so far.
- Any TOIL or carry over (if any) to add on top of this.
What policies should you set around holidays and leave in the UK?
When it comes to days off at your business, it’s always better to have clear policies to avoid operating on a case-by-case basis.
First, this ensures all team members are treated fairly, and second, it’s a better way for you to streamline your processes and make sure everyone is clear on what they can and cannot do.
Here are a few examples of where HR policies can be useful when it comes to calculating holidays:
- Carry over – with 28 days being the minimum, team members can only carry any day over 28 days of untaken leave in the next year. So, if you offer more than the statutory minimum allowance, you should seriously consider allowing your team members to carry over some leave. If you’re using an HRMS platform like CharlieHR, all you need to do is to set the number of days you allow your team to carry over, and the platform will automatically roll that time to the new year for all team members.
- Part-time workers – part-time workers have the same rights as any full-time employee in terms of pay, pension, training, promotion as well as holidays. However, you’re entitled to calculate their holidays pro rata as they work less hours than a full-time employee. You can choose to go for the minimum or offer them more.
- Bank holidays – as an employer, you can decide whether your team will work on bank holidays or not, or you can simply decide to include public holidays in your annual leave allowance. Make sure the process is outlined in your HR policies.
- Notice periods – when a team member joins, it’s important you include a notice period in their contract of employment, so you can not only correctly calculate their holiday entitlement but also have enough time to find their replacement.
FAQs
There are a few terms that might feel a bit confusing when you’re not familiar with them. Here’s an overview of what they mean:
- Carry over means carrying over holidays from one year onto the next, especially if you haven’t been able to take all of your holidays or if you’ve been ill or pregnant.
- TOIL means time off in lieu - the employer offers time off when people have worked more hours as an alternative to pay, for example, over-time or even if they’ve worked on a bank holiday that’s normally included in their allowance.
- PILON means payment in lieu of notice - that means employers can give the amount of notice they owe to the employee without them having to work their notice period. This is usually paid in one lump sum.
It largely depends on the allowance you’ve set for the year and whether your team members work part-time or full-time.
Just keep in mind that there is always a minimum required by UK employment law. For a full-time employee, the minimum is 28 days.
You can do the maths based on when your team member started, to see how much they’ve accrued so far, or you can simply use our calculator or HR software to find out.
It’s important to remember that you can count UK public holidays as part of your team’s statutory holiday entitlement. You don’t have to, but you can if you wish.
This means that if your team’s statutory holiday allowance is 28 days per year, Bank Holidays (usually 8 days per year) can be part of that entitlement.
In this example, you’d offer 20 days of holiday + 8 Bank Holidays.
Remember that this is the minimum entitlement allowed by the law — you can offer more than this. And we usually recommend companies to offer more, given today’s competitive hiring market.
If you use software like CharlieHR, your annual leave calendar will automatically take public holidays into account. You can decide to include public holidays in your team’s allowance or exclude them — the system will automatically adjust your team members’ allowance to reflect this.
There are many different types of leave, but the same rules don’t apply to all of them.
In the UK, annual leave means paid time off that team members are entitled to, but depending on the circumstances, they may be entitled to:
- Sick leave – where they can be eligible for Statutory Sick Pay (SPP) for up to 28 weeks and where your company can craft a policy to offer more, but cannot offer less. Have a look at our guide on long-term sick leave for more guidance.
- Parental leave – when team members become parents, your company can also build a policy to offer secure income and time off for both parents.
- Other types of leave – there are many different types of leave including bereavement leave or jury duty. Whereas some types of leave have rules in the UK, others are at the employer's discretion. That’s where we could recommend having clear rules on what can be done depending on each situation so you don’t deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
Sick leave and other types of leave do not carry over into the next year, however, it is possible for the employee to carry over holidays if they have not been able to take their leave due to being sick or having a child.
We’ve put together a guide to understand how to manage absences at your business so perhaps have a look at it for more information.
Keeping track of all types of leave – including annual leave – can be done in many different ways.
You can choose to do it manually by putting together a spreadsheet and saving it in different places on your drive to make sense of it all. However, remember that this will be a lengthy process, prone to human error.
Not only will you have to go back to the spreadsheet and do the calculations every time, but you’ll also have to fix broken formulas and ensure you got it all right.
It might work in the beginning but may become too much as you grow and have to do this frequently.
Instead, you can choose to automate the whole process by using HR software – have all your time off recorded in one place and your calculations are done in no time with a click of a button.
The plus side is your team members can even self-serve on the platform and request time off that you can approve. Onboard or offboard in a few clicks and never think about it again. Start a free 14-day trial today to find out more.
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