Free tool
Holiday Entitlement Calculator
Work out statutory holiday for anyone on your rota: full time, part time in days or hours, starters part-way through the year, and zero-hours staff on the 12.07% accrual rule. The result updates as you type and there is nothing to sign up for.
- 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days
- Pro-rata for mid-year starters
- 12.07% accrual for irregular hours
- Bank holiday share for part-timers
The person
The leave year
Adjustments
Their holiday
How it was worked out
- 5 days a week x 5.6 weeks = 28 days a year.
- Employed for the whole leave year, so the full amount applies.
- The eight bank holidays can be counted as part of the 28 days.
- No carry-over entered.
- No leave taken yet.
- 28 days available to book.
Assumptions
- Statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks a year, capped at 28 days. A contract can give more, never less.
- Bank holidays are not added on top: the 5.6 weeks can include them.
- Pro-rata for a starter is the share of the leave year left after their start date.
Keep a copy
Email the calculation to yourself to file against the person's record, or download the free rota template with a holiday request log built in.
Paddl works this out for every shift pattern automatically, including 12.07% accrual, and shows the balance on every holiday request.Stop working this out in a spreadsheet
- Entitlement and accrual for every contract type
- Holiday requests approved against the rota
- Timesheets, payroll export and the compliance records in one place
Paddl's rota carries the holiday balance for every person on it. Requests arrive with the answer attached, accrual for zero-hours staff updates from the timesheet, and the year-end carry-over is a report, not a reconciliation.
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How holiday entitlement works in UK hospitality
Every worker gets 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year. For somebody on five days a week that is 28 days, and 28 is also the legal cap, so a six-day week does not earn more. A part-timer gets the same 5.6 weeks of their own pattern: three days a week is 16.8 days, usually rounded up to 17. The eight bank holidays are not on top; the 5.6 weeks can include them, which is why a part-timer who never works a Monday is still owed a share of them.
Hospitality is where the rules get tested, because so many people are on zero-hours or irregular-hours contracts. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, those workers accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours they actually work in each pay period, so a casual who did 100 hours last month earned 12 hours of paid holiday. The figure comes from 5.6 weeks divided by the 46.4 weeks left when you take the holiday out of the year, and employers can pay it as rolled-up holiday pay at 12.07% on top of the hourly rate if the contract says so.
A starter part-way through the leave year gets the full-year figure pro-rated by the share of the year left after their start date, and a leaver is paid for whatever they accrued but did not take. The mistakes that reach a tribunal are almost always the same two: treating a zero-hours worker as if they had no entitlement, and forgetting that the leave year in the contract, not the calendar year, is the one that counts.