Your part-time holiday entitlement is the number of days you work each week multiplied by 5.6. Three days a week gives 16.8 days a year, four days gives 22.4, and five days gives the familiar 28. That is 5.6 weeks of your working week, not a share of somebody else’s 28 days — and it is a legal minimum your employer cannot go below.
The arithmetic is the easy part. The trouble starts with bank holidays, with employers who offer “20 days plus bank holidays”, and with what happens when your hours change halfway through the year. The calculator below shows its full workings, so you can check the pro rata number your employer has given you and see exactly which line the two of you diverge on.
Part-time holiday entitlement calculator
A pro rata holiday calculator that actually asks about bank holidays. Fill in how you work and what annual leave your employer offers — every step of the calculation is shown underneath the answer.
What this covers. Workers with the same set days, or the same set hours, each week — including where bank holidays are given on top. For compressed hours or a nine-day fortnight, use the hours mode. It does not handle annualised hours, rotating shift patterns, or holiday pay in pounds. If your hours are genuinely variable, see the 12.07% method below, which works differently. This is an estimate to check against your employer’s figure, not a legal determination. The calculation runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent to us or stored, and we do not sell HR or payroll software.
On this page
- How part-time holiday entitlement is calculated: days per week × 5.6
- Bank holidays: the part nearly everyone gets wrong
- The double pro rata trap: “20 days plus bank holidays”
- Why the GOV.UK holiday calculator gives a different number to your payslip
- Changing your hours mid-year: reducing hours, going part-time, or picking up a day
- Starting or leaving part-way through the leave year
- Bank holidays if you don’t work Mondays: part-time entitlement explained
- Holiday pay: the rate matters as much as the days
- Irregular hours and zero-hours: the 12.07% method
- Term-time only holiday entitlement: teaching assistants, and where the law is unsettled
- Carrying leave over, and what happens when you leave
- Can my employer tell me when to take my holiday?
- Since April 2026: six years of holiday records
- What to do if your holiday entitlement is wrong
- Frequently asked questions
How part-time holiday entitlement is calculated: days per week × 5.6
Almost every worker in the UK is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year. For someone working five days a week that comes to 28 days, and 28 days is also the statutory cap — work six or seven days a week and you are still entitled to 28, not 33.6. GOV.UK puts it as “almost all people classed as workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday a year”, and adds that “staff working 6 days a week are only entitled to 28 days’ paid holiday”.
The right comes from the Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833): four weeks under regulation 13, plus 1.6 weeks of additional leave under regulation 13A, which together make the familiar 5.6. Regulation 13A(3) is where the cap sits: the combined entitlement “is subject to a maximum of 28 days”. If your hours are genuinely irregular, a different regulation applies to you instead — see the 12.07% section below.
The word doing the work in all of that is weeks. Your entitlement is 5.6 of your own working weeks, so you multiply the days you work each week by 5.6:
| Days worked per week | As FTE | Statutory minimum |
|---|---|---|
| 5 days | 1.0 | 28 days |
| 4 days | 0.8 | 22.4 days |
| 3 days | 0.6 | 16.8 days |
| 2.5 days | 0.5 | 14 days |
| 2 days | 0.4 | 11.2 days |
| 1 day | 0.2 | 5.6 days |
If your employer holds your entitlement in hours rather than days, the same 5.6 multiplier applies to your weekly hours:
| Hours worked per week | Statutory minimum |
|---|---|
| 37.5 hours | 210 hours |
| 30 hours | 168 hours |
| 25 hours | 140 hours |
| 22.5 hours | 126 hours |
| 20 hours | 112 hours |
| 16 hours | 89.6 hours |
So 20 hours a week gives 112 hours of leave, 25 hours gives 140 and 30 hours gives 168.
Employers cannot round these part-days down. In your first year of employment they must round up to the nearest half day (Acas — How much holiday someone gets).
Bank holidays: the part nearly everyone gets wrong
You will read almost everywhere that you get “28 days including bank holidays”. As a statement of law that is wrong, and it is the root of most part-time holiday disputes.
There is no legal right to paid bank holidays at all. GOV.UK puts it plainly: “Bank or public holidays do not have to be given as paid leave.” It goes on: “An employer can choose to include bank holidays as part of a worker’s statutory annual leave.” So there are three arrangements you might be on, and they are not equivalent:
- 5.6 weeks, bank holidays counted inside it. The legal minimum, nothing more. If the workplace closes on bank holidays, those days come out of your allowance.
- A set number of days including bank holidays — “25 days inclusive”. Better than the minimum only if the number exceeds 28.
- A set number of days plus bank holidays — “20 days plus bank holidays”. The most generous, and the one that causes the most confusion for part-timers.
England and Wales have 8 permanent bank holidays, Scotland 9 and Northern Ireland 10 — the dates are on GOV.UK’s bank holidays page. Two things complicate those counts, and almost no calculator accounts for either.
Those numbers are per calendar year. If your leave year runs April to March, count the bank holidays that actually fall inside your leave year. Because Easter moves, an April-to-March year can capture two Easters and therefore contain ten England and Wales bank holidays rather than eight. Acas makes the point directly: “For leave years running from 1 April to 31 March, the number of bank holidays can change. This depends on when Easter is each year.” That is a two-day difference for exactly the term-time and public-sector workers most likely to be reading this.
One-off bank holidays are announced from time to time. Scotland had an extra one on 15 June 2026 for the World Cup, taking that calendar year to ten. Whether you get an additional day depends on your contract wording, not on the announcement.
Where bank holidays are given on top of annual leave, your pro rata share is (days you work ÷ days a full-timer works) × the number of bank holidays. For most people that is days per week divided by five:
| Days you work per week | England & Wales (8) | Scotland (9) | Northern Ireland (10) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 days | 8 days | 9 days | 10 days |
| 4 days | 6.4 days | 7.2 days | 8 days |
| 3 days | 4.8 days | 5.4 days | 6 days |
| 2.5 days | 4 days | 4.5 days | 5 days |
| 2 days | 3.2 days | 3.6 days | 4 days |
| 1 day | 1.6 days | 1.8 days | 2 days |
The double pro rata trap: “20 days plus bank holidays”
This is the single most common part-time holiday error, and almost no calculator handles it — including the official one.
If a full-timer gets 20 days plus 8 bank holidays, they get 28 days in total. If you work three days a week, your entitlement is three fifths of the whole 28 — not three fifths of the 20 with all eight bank holidays on top.
| Working three days a week, employer offers “20 days + bank holidays” | Result |
|---|---|
| Correct: (20 + 8) × 3/5 | 16.8 days |
| Wrong, in your favour: (20 × 3/5) + 8 | 20 days |
| Wrong, against you: 20 × 3/5, bank holidays ignored entirely | 12 days |
Both halves of the offer get pro rata treatment. The practical effect is that your bank holidays become part of one pooled allowance you book as you like, rather than eight specific dates. Acas confirms the underlying principle: “If an employer gives full-time workers more paid holiday than the legal minimum, they must give part-time workers more than the legal minimum.”
Why the GOV.UK holiday calculator gives a different number to your payslip
If you have used the official GOV.UK holiday entitlement calculator and your employer’s figure disagrees, the difference is usually explained by one of these, rather than by anyone cheating.
- The official calculator never asks about bank holidays. It calculates the statutory minimum only. If your employer gives bank holidays on top, the official figure will be lower than your real entitlement.
- It cannot handle contractual entitlement above the statutory minimum. If your contract says 25 or 30 days, the official tool has no way to take that in.
- Rounding happens at different points in the sequence. Converting a working pattern to days, rounding, and only then multiplying out to hours gives a different answer from carrying the decimal all the way through and rounding once at the end. Both are defensible; they do not agree. This is the most common source of a fraction-of-a-day gap, and it is reproducible — which means you can identify it rather than argue about it.
- Leave year versus calendar year. If your leave year runs April to March, a mid-year starter’s pro-rata figure will not match a January-to-December assumption — and, as above, the bank holiday count itself can differ.
- Days versus hours. Employers with variable shift lengths often hold entitlement in hours. Converting back to days using an average day length rarely lands on the same number.
How to prove which figure is right
- Write down your exact weekly pattern — days, or hours and the length of your normal day.
- Multiply by 5.6 without rounding anything. Keep every decimal place.
- Only round at the very end, and only upwards. Employers cannot round part-days down, and in your first year they must round up to the nearest half day.
- Compare that figure with your employer’s. If they match to within half a day, there is no dispute — you are looking at a rounding convention.
- If they differ by more than half a day, the difference is coming from bank holidays, your leave-year start date, or a working-pattern change — not from arithmetic.
Changing your hours mid-year: reducing hours, going part-time, or picking up a day
To work out holiday entitlement when your hours change mid-year, calculate each working pattern separately for the part of the leave year it applied to, then add the two figures together. You do not average the two patterns, and you do not apply the new pattern to the whole year.
A word on authority first, because it matters here. There is no provision in the Working Time Regulations covering a mid-year change of working pattern, and neither GOV.UK nor Acas addresses it. The segmented approach below is settled payroll practice and follows logically from entitlement being expressed in weeks — but it is not spelled out in statute. If your employer takes a different approach, that is an argument to have on the merits, not a breach you can point to in the regulations.
Take someone who worked five days a week from January to June, then three days a week from July to December:
- Work out the first segment. Five days a week is 28 days a year. January to June is half the leave year: 28 × 6/12 = 14 days — which is 2.8 weeks.
- Work out the second segment. Three days a week is 16.8 days a year. July to December is the other half: 16.8 × 6/12 = 8.4 days — also 2.8 weeks.
- Add them in weeks, not days. 2.8 + 2.8 = 5.6 weeks for the year, exactly as it should be.
Do not add those day figures into a single number. The 14 days are days of a five-day week and the 8.4 are days of a three-day week — they are different units. “22.4 days” is only meaningful if the first 14 are actually taken while you are still working five days.
What happens to leave you accrued but did not take before the change is genuinely contested, and you should know that before you argue about it. Many payroll systems convert it down: 14 five-day-week days becomes 2.8 weeks, which at three days a week is 8.4 days, leaving 16.8 days for the year. There is a competing view — grounded in case law on working-time rights rather than in the Working Time Regulations themselves — that leave already accrued at the full-time rate should not be retrospectively devalued when hours drop, which would leave you better off. Neither GOV.UK nor Acas resolves this. If a material amount of untaken leave is sitting on the wrong side of a change in your hours, that is worth a conversation with Acas or your union rather than accepting the payroll figure as settled.
One further wrinkle: if you take leave before the change, it is deducted at the value it had then. Five days booked while you were full time used five days of a five-day week, and should not later be re-valued as though you had taken it part time.
Compressed hours and a nine-day fortnight
If you work full-time hours over fewer, longer days — four ten-hour days, or a nine-day fortnight — your entitlement is still 5.6 × your own working week, and that produces the right answer either way round. Four ten-hour days is 5.6 × 4 = 22.4 days, which at ten hours a day is 224 hours. A colleague on five eight-hour days gets 28 days, which is also 224 hours. Nobody loses.
The error to watch for is your day count being inherited from the five-day figure instead of recalculated from your own week. If you work four longer days and your allowance says 28 days, that is 280 hours — more than you are entitled to, and a correction may be coming. If it says 22.4 days, that is right. Holding compressed-hours entitlement in hours rather than days avoids the confusion entirely, which is what the hours mode in the calculator above is for.
Starting or leaving part-way through the leave year
If you start or leave mid-year you get a proportion of the annual figure, based on how much of the leave year you are employed for. Work out your full-year entitlement first, then multiply by the fraction of the leave year you are there.
Someone working three days a week has 16.8 days for a full year. Start on 1 July with a January–December leave year and you are there for half of it: 16.8 × 6/12 = 8.4 days — and because this is your first year of employment, that rounds up to 8.5 days. Employers should pro-rate by the exact number of calendar days you are employed rather than by whole months, so expect payroll’s figure to sit within a fraction of a day of that before rounding.
Two things people commonly get wrong. First, your leave year is not necessarily the calendar year — many run April to March, and if yours does, a July start is three quarters of the way through rather than half. Check your contract; if it is silent, the leave year usually starts on the date you began work. If your leave year is aligned to the tax year, you can see how many weeks are left in the current financial year. Second, in your first year of employment any part-days must be rounded up to the nearest half day.
Monthly accrual is simply one twelfth of your annual entitlement. On 16.8 days that is 1.4 days a month; on 22.4 days it is 1.87 days a month.
Bank holidays if you don’t work Mondays: part-time entitlement explained
Most UK bank holidays fall on a Monday, so this comes up constantly — and the answer is the opposite of what most people expect.
Start with the firm rule: your employer cannot make you take a bank holiday out of your allowance if it falls on a day you do not work. Acas is explicit — “In this situation, the employer cannot make them use that day as part of their holiday entitlement.”
Once that is understood, the supposed unfairness reverses under a bank-holidays-included scheme. Acas gives exactly this example: Ali and Jo both work three days a week and both get 16.8 days; Ali works Mondays and Jo does not; the employer closes on bank holidays. “As more bank holidays fall on a Monday, Ali has to use more of their holiday entitlement for bank holidays than Jo.” It is the Monday worker whose bookable leave gets eaten first. Jo still loses any bank holidays that fall on days she does work — Good Friday and Christmas Day both fall on a Friday in 2026 — but fewer of them, so more of her 16.8 days stays hers to book.
The genuine grievance arises under a “days plus bank holidays” scheme that has not been pro-rated properly — which is the trap covered in the section above. Note also that your employer cannot simply pay you instead: Acas states that “a worker cannot get paid in lieu of bank holidays” unless it forms part of untaken entitlement when they leave. Converting bank holidays into a pro-rated pot of bookable days is what most well-run payroll teams do, but it is good practice rather than a statutory requirement.
The Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 (SI 2000/1551), regulation 5 sit behind all of this: a part-time worker has the right not to be treated less favourably than a comparable full-timer, and “the pro rata principle shall be applied unless it is inappropriate”. But read regulation 5(2) before relying on it — the right applies only where the treatment is “on the ground that the worker is a part-time worker” and is “not justified on objective grounds”. Missing a bank holiday because of which days you work, when a full-timer working Tuesday to Saturday would be affected identically, is not automatically less favourable treatment on grounds of part-time status.
Holiday pay: the rate matters as much as the days
Working out the right number of days is only half of it. If you do regular overtime, the rate your holiday is paid at is worth checking as closely as the number of days.
GOV.UK requires employers to pay regular-hours workers, full or part time, “at least 4 weeks of the worker’s statutory entitlement at their ‘normal’ rate of pay” and “the remaining 1.6 weeks at a ‘basic’ rate of pay”.
What counts as normal is broader than many payslips assume: “‘Normal’ rate of pay includes commission, regular overtime payments, and any payments related to length of service or professional qualifications. It does not usually include bonus payments.” If you regularly work overtime and your holiday pay matches your basic contracted hours only, that is worth querying.
Rolled-up holiday pay — an uplift folded into your hourly rate instead of paid when you take leave — is unlawful for regular-hours workers. GOV.UK: “an employer cannot include an amount for holiday pay in the hourly rate”. It is permitted for irregular-hours and part-year workers, unless their leave year began on or before 31 March 2024.
The 4/1.6 split does not apply to irregular-hours and part-year workers at all. For them, GOV.UK is clear that “all leave must be paid at their ‘normal’ rate of pay”.
Irregular hours and zero-hours: the 12.07% method
If your hours are genuinely variable, none of the arithmetic above applies to you. For leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period (GOV.UK — Calculate leave entitlement).
You sit under a different regulation from everyone else on this page. Regulation 15B of the Working Time Regulations 1998 governs your accrual — regulations 13 and 13A now expressly do not apply to you for leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024. Regulation 15B(4) still caps you: “a worker cannot, in any leave year, accrue more than 28 days of annual leave under this regulation.”
The rule was introduced by the Employment Rights (Amendment, Revocation and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2023 (SI 2023/1426), which came into force on 1 January 2024. Note the two dates differ: it is the April date that governs which leave years are affected, as the Department for Business and Trade guidance sets out.
Where does 12.07% come from? It falls out of the statutory entitlement itself:
- A year has 52 weeks.
- 5.6 of those are paid leave.
- That leaves 46.4 working weeks.
- 5.6 ÷ 46.4 = 12.07%.
So work 30 hours in a week and you accrue 30 × 12.07% = 3.621, rounded to 4 hours of leave — that worked example is GOV.UK’s own. Regulation 15B(5) sets the rounding precisely: a fraction of an hour “is to be treated as zero if it is less than 30 minutes and one hour if it is 30 minutes or more than 30 minutes”.
Whether this applies to you turns on a definition narrower than most people assume. Both the DBT guidance and Acas set it out this way:
- An irregular-hours worker is one whose paid hours in each pay period are wholly or mostly variable under their contract. Zero-hours, casual and bank contracts usually qualify.
- A fixed rotating shift pattern does not qualify. If you work 15 hours one week and 20 the next on a settled rota, your hours are fixed — just rotating — and you use the ordinary 5.6 weeks calculation.
- A part-year worker has a contract all year but is only required to work part of it, with periods of at least a week where they are neither working nor paid.
One correction worth making, because it appears in a lot of otherwise good guidance: 12.07% was not “reinstated” in 2024. It began as an Acas rule of thumb, the Supreme Court held it unlawful in Harpur Trust v Brazel [2022] UKSC 21, and regulation 15B then put it into statute for the first time, for a defined group of workers.
Term-time only holiday entitlement: teaching assistants, and where the law is unsettled
In Harpur Trust (Appellant) v Brazel (Respondent) [2022] UKSC 21, decided on 20 July 2022, the Supreme Court considered a music teacher on a permanent contract who was paid only for hours taught in term time. Her employer had switched her to 12.07%. The Court unanimously held that a part-year worker on a permanent contract is entitled to the full 5.6 weeks, not pro-rated to reflect the portion of the year actually worked, and that her holiday pay had to be averaged over the weeks she was actually paid, ignoring the weeks she was not.
The Government estimated this affected between 320,000 and 500,000 permanent term-time and zero-hours workers, roughly 37% of them in education, plus 80,000 to 200,000 agency workers (the Government’s January 2023 consultation). The 2023 Regulations were the direct response, and for leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024 a term-time worker who meets the statutory part-year worker definition accrues at 12.07% instead.
Which side of the line you fall on depends on how you are paid across the school holidays:
| How you are paid over the school holidays | Where you probably stand |
|---|---|
| Paid nothing during the holidays | You are likely to meet the part-year worker definition, provided your contract subsists all year. If so, 12.07% accrual applies from your first leave year beginning on or after 1 April 2024. |
| Paid a levelled salary in twelve equal instalments across the whole year | Unsettled. Brazel may still apply to you. Take advice before accepting either answer. |
The second row is where a great many teaching assistants and local-government staff sit, and it is genuinely unresolved. The part-year definition requires a period of at least a week for which you are not paid. The DBT guidance offers this steer: “it would still be possible for a worker to be paid ‘during’ that period so long as there is no expectation of them working in that period and nor are they receiving payment ‘for’ that period.” That points towards a levelled salary not excluding you — but how a tribunal would treat an annualised salary has not, as far as we can establish, been tested at appellate level. If you are in this position it is worth a conversation with Acas or your union rather than accepting your employer’s reading. (If you are also working out which school year a child is in, our UK school year by age reference covers year groups and cutoffs.)
Carrying leave over, and what happens when you leave
Ordinarily you can carry over a maximum of 8 days of a 28-day entitlement, and only where your employer agrees. Beyond that, per GOV.UK and the DBT guidance:
- Sickness — up to 20 days for a regular-hours worker, or up to 28 days for an irregular-hours or part-year worker, to be used within 18 months of the end of the leave year in which it accrued.
- Maternity, parental or adoption leave — your employer must let you carry untaken leave into the next year. Holiday carries on accruing for the whole of maternity leave; our maternity leave date calculator works out the dates that period runs between.
- Your employer’s fault — if they failed to give you a reasonable opportunity to take leave, never warned you it would be lost, or did not pay rolled-up holiday pay that was owed, you may be able to carry over some or all of it.
Convert those day figures to your own week. They are quoted for a five-day worker: the 8 days is really 1.6 weeks and the 20 days is 4 weeks. For someone working three days a week they become 4.8 days and 12 days. This is the same trap as bank holidays — a day count only means something once you know whose week it belongs to.
One source tension worth knowing about if you go checking: GOV.UK’s plain-English page says workers in the employer-fault situations can carry over “their whole leave entitlement”, while the more technical DBT guidance caps a regular-hours worker at 20 days. Both are Government sources. The safe reading is that you may be able to carry over up to 20 days as a regular-hours worker, and potentially your full entitlement if you are an irregular-hours or part-year worker.
On leaving a job, untaken statutory leave must be paid in lieu — and GOV.UK is explicit that employers must do so “even if the worker is dismissed for gross misconduct”. Payment in lieu is only lawful on termination; it cannot be used to buy back your leave while you are still employed. If you have taken more leave than you had accrued, the same guidance says your employer must not deduct it from your final pay unless you agreed to that in writing beforehand.
Can my employer tell me when to take my holiday?
Worth knowing before you budget your 16.8 days as freely bookable. An employer can require you to take annual leave on particular days — the classic case is closing over Christmas — provided they give enough notice. Acas sets the notice requirement at “at least twice as many days before as the amount of days they need them to take”, and is explicit that “this is calendar days, not working days”. So to make you take five days, they must give ten calendar days’ notice. A contract or other relevant agreement can set a different notice period, longer or shorter, so check yours.
Since April 2026: six years of holiday records
Since 6 April 2026, employers must keep records of annual leave and holiday pay for at least six years from the date the record was made, documenting the leave taken and the holiday pay paid. Employers who cannot show they keep adequate holiday records may face a fine. See GOV.UK — Holiday pay and Acas.
For anyone querying an entitlement this is quietly useful: the calculation behind your allowance is now something your employer is legally required to be able to produce.
What to do if your holiday entitlement is wrong
Start with payroll or HR, and take the workings from the calculator above with you — the great majority of these are configuration errors in a leave system rather than anything deliberate. If that does not resolve it, raise it formally in writing as a grievance. Acas runs a free, confidential helpline on 0300 123 1100, open Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm, and it is the right next step before anything formal.
If it comes to an employment tribunal, there are two deadlines to keep in mind.
- Three months minus one day to notify Acas, for most claims, running from the date you were not paid correctly (Acas — Employment tribunal time limits); where there has been a series of underpayments, section 23(3) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 runs the clock from the last deduction in the series. Acas is clear that “going through grievance, disciplinary or appeal procedures does not change your time limit”. Notifying Acas pauses the clock while early conciliation runs, but only if you notify within the original limit. This is the position today. Acas says the limit for most claims is due to rise to six months in October 2026 under the Employment Rights Act 2025, though implementation remains subject to government consultation — until it is actually in force, work to three months.
- Two years of back pay. Even where a claim succeeds, section 23(4A) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 prevents a tribunal considering any deduction paid more than two years before the claim is presented. If you have been underpaid for longer than that, the older shortfall is generally not recoverable through this route.
Frequently asked questions
How many holidays do I get if I work 3 days a week?
The statutory minimum is 16.8 days a year — 3 × 5.6. If your employer offers more than the legal minimum, take the full-time total including any bank holidays and multiply by three fifths.
How many days holiday am I entitled to if I work 4 days a week?
22.4 days a year as a statutory minimum — 4 × 5.6. Again, if your employer gives more than the minimum, take the full-time total including any bank holidays and multiply by four fifths.
Do part-time workers get bank holidays?
There is no automatic right to time off on a bank holiday for anyone, full or part time, paid or unpaid — your contract decides. If your employer gives bank holidays on top of annual leave, a part-timer receives a pro-rated share of them, not all of them, usually as extra bookable days rather than the specific dates. Your employer cannot make you use a bank holiday that falls on a day you never work.
Is 28 days holiday including bank holidays?
It can be. The legal minimum is 5.6 weeks, which is 28 days for a five-day week, and your employer is allowed to count bank holidays towards it. They are equally allowed to give bank holidays on top. Your contract decides which.
What happens to my holiday if I reduce my hours mid-year?
Your entitlement is calculated in segments: each working pattern is worked out separately for the part of the leave year it applied to. Add the segments together in weeks rather than days, because a day of a five-day week is not the same unit as a day of a three-day week. Leave you had already taken is deducted at the value it had when you took it.
How much holiday do I get if I start a job part-way through the year?
A proportion of the full-year figure, based on how much of the leave year you are employed for. Work out the annual entitlement for your working pattern, then multiply by the fraction of the leave year remaining. Check whether your leave year runs January to December or April to March — it changes the answer.
Why doesn’t my employer’s figure match the GOV.UK calculator?
Most often because the official calculator only ever works out the statutory minimum and never asks about bank holidays or contractual entitlement above 5.6 weeks. Rounding at different points in the calculation, leave-year start dates and holding entitlement in hours rather than days account for most of the rest.
Can my employer round my holiday down?
No. Employers cannot round part-days down, and in your first year of employment they must round up to the nearest half day.
Do I still get holiday pay if I’m dismissed for gross misconduct?
Yes. GOV.UK states that employers must pay for untaken statutory leave even where a worker is dismissed for gross misconduct.
Information, not advice. This page explains the statutory position in Great Britain and is not legal advice. Holiday rules turn on the wording of your own contract. The 2024 holiday reforms described here extend to Great Britain only — Northern Ireland has its own Working Time Regulations and has not adopted them in the same form, so the 5.6 weeks calculation holds there but the 12.07% section does not apply. If something material turns on your entitlement, contact Acas on 0300 123 1100, your union, or an employment solicitor. We re-check this page against GOV.UK, Acas and legislation.gov.uk whenever the rules change, and at least twice a year.
Until Then is funded by advertising. We do not sell HR or payroll software, and no employer or software vendor has paid for or reviewed this page. More date and entitlement tools are on our all calculators page.
Information correct as of 31 July 2026, and current for the 2026/27 leave year. Sources: GOV.UK — Holiday entitlement; GOV.UK — Calculate leave entitlement; GOV.UK — Holiday pay; GOV.UK — Taking holiday before leaving a job; GOV.UK — UK bank holidays; Department for Business and Trade — Holiday pay and entitlement reforms; Acas — Checking holiday entitlement; Acas — Irregular hours and part-year workers; Acas — Employment tribunal time limits; Acas — Employment Rights Act 2025. Legislation and case law: the Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833), regulations 13, 13A and 15B; the Employment Rights (Amendment, Revocation and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2023 (SI 2023/1426); the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 (SI 2000/1551), regulation 5; the Employment Rights Act 1996, section 23; Harpur Trust (Appellant) v Brazel (Respondent) [2022] UKSC 21.