What is the basic holiday entitlement?

​The basic holiday entitlement is part of your “basic holiday rights”. Most employees in the UK are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave which would translate to 28 days for an employee working five days a week. A new employee starts building up holiday as soon as they start work although the employer can impose restrictions on when holiday can be taken. For any holiday taken that is part of your basic holiday entitlement, you will get paid your usual rate.

How do you work out bank holidays for part-time workers?

Your employer is able to control when you take your holiday and they can make you take bank holidays from your holiday entitlement when they happen to be on your working days.

If you are a shift worker where all full-time and part-time workers are equally likely to be scheduled to work on a bank holiday then it may be enough for your employer to give all part-time workers a paid day off.

If however, you work a fixed number of days every week, this practice could put you at a disadvantage. For example, in the UK, because most bank and public holidays fall on a Monday, those who do not work Mondays will be entitled to fewer days off.

If this was the case, your employer could give all employees a pro-rata entitlement of days off in lieu based on the number of hours they work. 

What about employees starting or leaving partway through the year?

If you have employees who have started mid-way through the year you can work out their pro-rata holiday by using a formula or you can use our online calculator. Better still if your leave management system has a built-in calculator, you can rely on it to calculate the right amount. 

If an employee works full time but has only worked 13 out of 52 weeks this year then you can work out their pro-rata holiday as proportional to their annual entitlement. In this case, if the annual entitlement is 28 days then for 13 weeks worked they would get the following:

28 * (13/52) = 28 * 0.25 = 7 days

How to work out pro-rata entitlement?

​The best way to work out the holiday entitlement for your part-time employees is to multiply the number of days they work each week by the statutory figure as determined by your local government (for the UK this is 5.6).

For example, if a pro-rata employee works 2.5 days a week, their statutory holiday entitlement will be 2.5 x 5.6, or 14 days.

How to work out pro-rata holidays for part-time workers?

You should be treated the same way whether you are a part-time worker or a full-time worker. Your employer can’t round down the number of days given, because this would be unfavourable treatment, but fractions of a day might be given as hours.

If you work part-time, you’re still entitled to 5.6 x the number of days in your usual working week. Let’s say you work three days a week, then you would be entitled to 16.8 days per year:

3 days x 5.6 weeks = 16.8 days

You can calculate this yourself or use our holidays pro-rata calculator to be on the safe side.

How to learn more about holiday entitlement?

There is always more to learn about holiday entitlement and calculation. We recommend the following article as published on the gov.uk website, which provides more detailed guidance on Holiday pay and employment rights.

We can also recommend the holiday entitlement article published by ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service).