UK Holiday Entitlement Calculator

Nearly every worker in the UK, not just full-time employees, has a legal right to paid time off — this comes from the Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833), not from an individual employment contract. Regulation 13 gives everyone 4 weeks of paid leave a year, a right carried over from EU law; regulation 13A, added by the Working Time (Amendment) Regulations 2007 (SI 2007/2079), tops that up with a further 1.6 weeks. Together that is 5.6 weeks — 28 days for someone working a standard 5-day week — and unlike statutory redundancy pay, there is no minimum length of service to qualify: the right starts building from your very first day on the job. This calculator turns your working pattern and employment dates into that entitlement, pro-rated for a partial year and tracked as accrued-to-date, the same way most UK payroll systems work it out.

The 5.6-week figure is not open-ended. Regulation 13A(3) sets a hard ceiling of 28 days a year, whatever your working pattern — someone working six or seven days a week does not get 5.6 × 6 or 5.6 × 7 days off; they are capped at 28, same as a standard 5-day worker. Below a 5-day week, the formula simply scales down: 5.6 weeks multiplied by your days per week, with no cap needed because the result naturally stays under 28. For a partial year, this calculator applies the proportion of the leave year you actually worked to your full entitlement, counting dates inclusively. Maria, for example, joins a company on 1 July 2026, on a standard 5-day week, in a leave year running 1 January to 31 December. Working the whole year would give her the full 28 days, but from 1 July to 31 December is 184 of the year's 365 days, so her first, partial year works out at 28 × (184 ÷ 365) ≈ 14.1 days.

One of the most misunderstood parts of UK holiday law is bank holidays. There is no separate statutory right to have Christmas Day, Boxing Day, or any other bank holiday off with pay — an employer is free to count the 8 bank holidays in England and Wales (Scotland has 9, Northern Ireland has 10) as part of your 28-day statutory allowance, rather than giving them on top of it. This calculator lets you flag either approach, and if bank holidays sit outside your allowance, it pro-rates them by your working pattern, the same way it pro-rates the core entitlement. Take Tom, who works 3 days a week, 22.5 hours in total, for an employer that treats bank holidays as an extra on top of his statutory days. His base entitlement is 5.6 × 3 = 16.8 days; his share of the 8 bank holidays, scaled to his three-fifths working pattern, adds 8 × (3 ÷ 5) = 4.8 days, for a total of 21.6 days — or, converted at his 7.5-hour average working day, 162 hours.

This calculator assumes a broadly regular working pattern — roughly the same number of days or hours most weeks. Workers with genuinely irregular hours, or who only work part of the year (casual staff, exam invigilators, some term-time-only roles), fall under a different statutory method since 1 January 2024: the Employment Rights (Amendment, Revocation and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2023 (SI 2023/1426) set their accrual at 12.07% of the hours actually worked in each pay period, under a new regulation 15B of the Working Time Regulations. That 12.07% figure comes from dividing 5.6 weeks of leave by the 46.4 working weeks that remain in a year once the 5.6 weeks are set aside, and it replaced the older 52-week average-pay method the Supreme Court had required for such workers in Harpur Trust v Brazel [2022] UKSC 21.

'Accrued to date' in this tool is simply your full entitlement multiplied by how far you are through the leave year, capped at the year-end date — useful for checking a payslip or working out a leaver's final balance, though your employer's own payroll system may round differently. Where a pro-rata calculation produces a fraction of a day, ACAS guidance recommends rounding in the worker's favour rather than down, since underpaying statutory leave is a common source of tribunal claims. If your employment ends before you have taken all the leave you have built up, regulation 14 entitles you to be paid for it instead, worked out on the same pro-rata basis. Unused leave generally cannot be carried into the next leave year, though the 1.6-week UK addition can be carried over by agreement, and longer carry-over is allowed where illness, maternity, or other family leave genuinely prevented you from taking it.

As with any statutory calculation, treat this as a floor, not a ceiling: many employers offer more than 28 days, sometimes rising with length of service, and this calculator has no way of knowing what your own contract promises — check your written statement of employment or staff handbook alongside this result, not instead of it.