UK Annual Leave Rights 2025: How Holiday Entitlement Works for Every Type of Worker

Holiday entitlement in the UK sounds simple until you actually try to work it out. You have a right to 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave each year, but what that looks like in practice depends on how many hours you work, when you work them, and whether your schedule ever stays the same from one week to the next. For millions of workers on zero hours contracts, shift patterns and term-time arrangements, the rules are anything but straightforward.

The good news is that the law has been updated significantly in recent years to make things fairer. Reforms that came into effect in January 2024 overhauled how holiday pay is calculated for workers with irregular hours, closing a gap that left many part-year workers underpaid for years. Understanding your rights is genuinely worth your time, underpaid holiday is one of the most common wage violations in the UK workforce. Use our holiday entitlement calculator to get your personal figure in seconds.

The 5.6 weeks statutory minimum explained

Every worker in the UK is entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave per year under the Working Time Regulations 1998. For a full-time employee working five days a week, that works out to 28 days. Employers can include bank holidays within this 28-day total, which is common practice. So a full-time employee with eight bank holidays and 20 days of standard leave has exactly met the statutory minimum, their employer is not obliged to give them more unless the contract says so.

The 28-day cap is worth knowing. Even if someone works seven days a week, their statutory entitlement is capped at 28 days. Employers can offer more than the statutory minimum, and many do, particularly in professional services and the public sector, but 5.6 weeks is the legal floor that applies to everyone.

The entitlement begins from day one of employment. There is no qualifying period for statutory annual leave. A worker who starts a job in November and wants to take time off in December has already accrued some holiday and can take it, subject to their employer's approval process. New starters often accrue leave at a rate of 1/12 of their annual entitlement per month during the first year.

Part-time workers and pro-rated entitlement

Part-time workers receive the same entitlement as full-time colleagues on a pro-rata basis. The calculation is straightforward: multiply 5.6 by the number of days worked per week. Someone working three days a week gets 16.8 days of statutory holiday. That 16.8 figure can be rounded up to 17 days, it can never be rounded down. Treating part-time workers less favourably on holiday entitlement is unlawful under the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000.

Where it gets trickier is when someone works different hours on different days. A worker who does a four-hour day on Monday and an eight-hour day on Thursday is still working two days a week for entitlement purposes, but when they take a day off the value of that holiday day depends on which day they take. Employers who express holiday in hours rather than days often find this easier to administer. Expressing 5.6 weeks of holiday in hours (for a 20-hour week: 5.6 x 20 = 112 hours per year) means a worker simply uses however many hours they would have been scheduled to work on any given day they take as leave.

Zero hours and irregular hours workers: the 2024 reforms

Before 2024, zero hours workers and casual employees were often paid a rolled-up holiday rate of 12.07% of their earnings in each pay packet rather than receiving paid time off in the traditional sense. The Supreme Court's ruling in the Harpur Trust v Brazel case in 2022 threw this method into doubt for certain categories of worker, prompting the government to legislate.

The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act and subsequent regulations introduced a new category: irregular hours workers and part-year workers. From April 2024, these workers accrue holiday at a rate of 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period. This is essentially the old rolled-up method reinstated by statute, but applied correctly. The 12.07% figure comes from dividing 5.6 weeks by 46.4 weeks (the number of weeks in a year after subtracting the 5.6 weeks of leave) and expressing it as a percentage: 5.6 / 46.4 = 12.07%.

Employers can now legally pay rolled-up holiday pay to irregular hours workers, provided it is shown as a separate line item on payslips and workers understand they are receiving their holiday pay as they go. For workers who prefer to take time off in the conventional way rather than receive rolled-up pay, the accrual method still tracks what they are owed.

How holiday pay is calculated using the 52-week reference period

For workers whose pay varies, which includes most people working irregular hours, shift workers with variable overtime, and commission-based employees, holiday pay must reflect their normal remuneration. You cannot be paid just your basic wage for a week's holiday if you would normally earn significantly more through shifts or commission. That principle was established in a series of employment tribunal and court cases over the years.

The 52-week reference period is the mechanism that gives effect to this. When calculating holiday pay for a variable-pay worker, the employer looks back at the previous 52 weeks of paid work and averages the weekly pay across those weeks. Weeks where no work was done are excluded and replaced with earlier weeks, so the reference period always covers 52 weeks of actual earnings. This prevents periods of low or no work from dragging down the average.

Bank holidays: what you are and are not entitled to

There is no automatic legal right to paid time off on bank holidays in the UK. Whether you get bank holidays off, paid or unpaid, depends entirely on your contract. This surprises many people. The statutory 5.6 weeks (28 days for full-timers) can include bank holidays at your employer's discretion. A contract that says "20 days holiday plus bank holidays" is offering more than the statutory minimum. A contract that says "28 days holiday inclusive of bank holidays" is offering exactly the minimum and can require you to use your entitlement on bank holidays.

This matters particularly for workers whose rest days fall on bank holidays. If you work Monday to Friday and a bank holiday falls on a Monday, your employer can require you to take that as one of your 28 statutory days. But if you work Tuesday to Saturday and bank holidays always fall on days you are not contracted to work, you should not be disadvantaged, you cannot be forced to use holiday entitlement on days you were never scheduled to work.

Part-time workers sometimes face issues here too. If bank holidays always fall on days they do not work, they should receive the pro-rated equivalent of the days their full-time colleagues get off. Treating a part-timer worse by denying them the bank holiday equivalent is unlawful.

Carry over rules and what happens at the end of the leave year

As a general rule, statutory annual leave cannot be carried forward from one holiday year to the next. You are expected to take your leave in the year it accrues. Employers are actually required to facilitate this, they must give workers a reasonable opportunity to take their leave and must warn workers if they are in danger of losing untaken holiday at year end.

There are exceptions. Workers who could not take their leave because of sickness can carry forward up to four weeks (the EU-derived entitlement, not the full 5.6 weeks) for up to 18 months. Workers on maternity, paternity or adoption leave can carry forward their full statutory entitlement into the next leave year. And from 2023, workers who were unable to take leave because of COVID-19 had two years to use carried-over leave, though that window is now closing for most workers.

The remaining 1.6 weeks of the 5.6-week entitlement (the additional portion above four weeks) follows different rules and generally cannot be carried over unless the contract expressly permits it. Checking what your contract says matters here, because employers can be more generous than the statutory minimum.

Taking holiday during your notice period

Holiday entitlement and notice periods often collide when someone leaves a job. If you resign or are made redundant, any accrued but untaken holiday must either be taken during the notice period or paid out as a cash sum at the end of employment. Employers cannot simply cancel your untaken leave without compensating you for it.

Employers can require you to take holiday during your notice period, provided they give you the correct notice. The required notice from an employer is at least twice the length of the holiday period they want you to take. So if they want you to take five days' leave, they need to tell you at least ten days in advance. Our notice period calculator can help you understand the timeline of your departure. Similarly, if you want to take annual leave during your notice and the employer refuses without good reason, you may have grounds for a complaint. Whether your take-home pay during a holiday period is correct depends on how your holiday pay rate is calculated, which, for many workers, involves the 52-week reference period described above.

Employers refusing holiday requests more generally have the right to say no, but must give notice equivalent to the amount of leave being refused. If you request five days off, they must tell you at least five days before the intended start date that they are declining. They also cannot simply refuse all holiday requests indefinitely, that would breach the obligation to ensure workers take their statutory entitlement during the leave year.