Annual Leave

The right to paid annual leave is set out in the Working Time Regulations 1998. Full-time workers receive a minimum of 5.6 weeks (28 days) per year; employers may include bank holidays within this entitlement. Part-time workers receive a pro-rata entitlement — for example, a worker doing three days per week gets 16.8 days. Following changes introduced in 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue leave at 12.07% of hours worked in each pay period. Holiday pay must reflect normal pay, including regular overtime, commission, and allowances — not just basic salary (following Supreme Court rulings). Workers cannot contract out of the right to paid leave. Unused statutory leave can be carried over in cases of illness, maternity or family leave, or where the employer prevented the worker from taking leave. Employers must not substitute cash payments for untaken leave except on termination.

In practice, two questions cause nearly all disputes: how much leave you have accrued, and what a day of it is worth. The 5.6 weeks is a floor, so start with your contract — many employers give more, and the extra contractual days can carry different rules on carry-over and pay. Leave accrues from day one of employment, including during a probation period, and during sick leave, maternity leave and other family leave.

Worked example: Jo works four days a week and earns £120 basic per day, plus regular commission averaging £30 a day. Her statutory entitlement is four fifths of 28 days, so 22.4 days. When she takes a week off, her holiday pay for the four weeks derived from EU-origin law must reflect normal remuneration including that regular commission, so roughly £150 a day rather than £120. She spots that her employer has been paying basic only, raises it in writing, and — because unlawful deductions from wages have a three-month time limit running from the last underpayment in a series — acts promptly rather than waiting for the end of the leave year.

The misconceptions run deep. Bank holidays are not an automatic extra eight days; whether they sit inside or on top of the 5.6 weeks is a contractual question. An employer can require you to take leave at particular times, provided it gives notice of at least twice the length of the leave, and can refuse a request with notice equal to the length requested. Rolled-up holiday pay, once unlawful, is permitted only for irregular-hours and part-year workers under the 2024 rules and must be shown separately on the payslip. And untaken statutory leave cannot simply be bought out mid-employment, however convenient that seems to both sides.

Annual leave sits within the same Working Time Regulations framework as rest breaks and night work, and interacts with statutory sick pay when someone falls ill during booked leave, and with zero-hours contracts where accrual is calculated as a percentage of hours worked. Read our guides to holiday pay and the Working Time Regulations before challenging a calculation.