How should I calculate holiday and bank holiday entitlement for part timers?

Statutory entitlement for full-time employees is 28 days’ paid annual leave. Calculating for part time employees can be a more involved…

To explain better, a part-time employee is pro-rated to a full-time employee’s entitlement and is based around their working week.

There are normally eight specified bank holidays each year

To calculate holiday entitlement for part timers, use the following method:

5.6 x number of working days = Holiday entitlement

When employees are entitled to bank holidays off work on top of their annual leave entitlement, this can cause problems and this is because most bank holidays fall on a Monday, so a part-timer who works on a Monday will have a higher proportion of their holidays “fixed” than a colleague working on (say) a Tuesday or Wednesday.

If an employee is typically scheduled to work on a bank holiday and receives this day off as a fixed holiday, their holiday entitlement should automatically be reduced by one day.

If an employee is not typically contracted or scheduled to work on a day when a bank holiday falls, this does not affect their holiday entitlement, as it is not a working day.

The simplest and fairest way of calculating entitlements is to deal with all holidays as an inclusive amount. Therefore, if a full-time employee is entitled to 25 days annual leave plus eight bank holidays, this gives a total of 33 days per annum and this can be expressed as:

6.6 weeks’ holiday (33 ÷ 5 = 6.6).

Calculating leave in this way will ensure employers always meet the statutory minimum.

It is then possible to easily calculate a part timer’s total entitlement, for example, an employee working three days  per week would be entitled to:

6.6 x 3 (days worked per week) = 19.8 days holiday per year.

These calculations include the bank holiday entitlement.

If your organisation allocates more holiday than the statutory entitlement, you need to ensure that your part time employees also receive the additional entitlement on a pro rata basis.

For example, if full-time workers are entitled to (say) 33 days’ holiday per year, a person who works four days per week should be entitled to take:

26.4 days’ holiday per year (4 ÷ 5 x 33 = 26.4).

Legislation does not allow leave to be rounded down, and there is no obligation to round up the leave, but employers can do so if preferred. Therefore, if an employee has 26.4 days holidays, the holidays may be rounded up to 26.5 days, but they may not be rounded down to 26 days.

Calculating annual leave as a number of hours per year.

It is often best when someone works different hours each day, to express holiday entitlement as a number of hours per annum.

If your full-time employees are entitled to 25 days annual leave plus eight bank holidays for example, (which gives 33 days in total per annum) the entitlement of a part time worker who works 20 hours per week would be calculated as:

20 (hours per week worked) x 6.6 = 132 hours holiday per year.

Again, this calculation includes the bank holiday entitlement.

If a part-timer who works 4 hours on a Tuesday and 6 on a Thursday and wishes to take these days as holiday, their annual entitlement would be reduced by 10 hours.

If you’d like further information or to book an HR consultation please contact Karen Scott on 07762 629 448 or get in touch by clicking here.