https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/calculating-holiday-entitlement-for-part-year-and-irregular-hours-workers

Update

Open consultation
Calculating holiday entitlement for part-year and irregular hours workers

Information

There are different potential approaches to public and bank holidays in relation to part–time workers. Some employers allow workers to take a day of leave if a public or bank holiday falls on a day on which they would normally work, but not where the holiday falls on a non-working day. However, this approach can lead to an imbalance between full-time workers and part–time workers, as part–time workers who work on Mondays (which is the day on which many bank holidays fall) will get proportionately more holiday than full-time workers, while part–time workers who do not work on Mondays will be disadvantaged.

An employer that adopts this approach could be vulnerable to claims that it has treated part–time workers less favourably than comparable full-time workers, in breach of the Part–time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 (SI 2000/1551)

Most of the UK’s bank holidays fall on a Monday or Friday. In companies that give paid bank holidays, and where part-time employees don’t usually work on these days, those part-time employees would end up receiving proportionately fewer days’ leave than their full-time colleagues.

To prevent this inequality, many companies give their part-time employees a pro-rated bank holiday allowance. This is calculated based on the number of hours worked, regardless of the days that are worked and irrespective of whether or not they would be bank holidays.

If the part-time worker is due to work on a bank holiday, then they would need to book it as holiday as normal and it would come out of their total holiday entitlement.

A less risky approach is to pro rate entitlement to time off in respect of public and bank holidays. This is the best practice approach recommended in the Government’s (now archived) guidance document on part–time workers.

Pro rata bank holidays

For all employees, minimum statutory holiday entitlement is calculated by multiplying the number of days worked per week by a factor of 5.6. The result – which is capped at 28 days – is the number of days of annual leave that the worker is statutorily entitled to receive.

You don’t have to give bank holidays as paid leave, but many companies do choose to include them as part of the annual leave entitlement.

For part-time annual leave, the same 5.6 factor is used.

Let’s look at an example – if an employee is working two days per week, they’d be entitled to 11.2 days’ holiday. Or, if they work three days per week, they’d receive 16.8 days. Of course, part of a day is difficult to take as holiday, so part-days are generally rounded up to keep things simple.

The Magic Formula

(number of hours worked per week / number of hours in a full-time week) x (number of bank holidays x hours per working day)

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