Almost every worker in the UK — full-time, part-time, on a zero-hours contract, or somewhere in between — has a legal right to paid time off work. The confusion usually isn’t over whether the right exists, it’s over exactly how many days or hours it works out to for a particular pattern of work. This guide walks through the statutory minimum, the cap that applies to standard working weeks, how the numbers change for part-time and irregular-hours workers, and what happens when someone starts or leaves a job partway through the year.
For a quick answer tailored to your own hours, the holiday entitlement calculator applies these rules to your specific days-per-week or hours pattern and shows the working.
What the 5.6-Weeks Statutory Minimum Actually Means
The legal baseline for paid annual leave in Great Britain is 5.6 weeks per year. That figure is made up of two parts stacked together:
- 4 weeks, derived from the EU Working Time Directive, which the UK implemented through the Working Time Regulations 1998.
- 1.6 weeks added on top as a UK-only enhancement, introduced in 2007-08.
Together, 4 + 1.6 = 5.6 weeks. This is expressed in weeks, not a flat number of days, precisely because it needs to scale to however many days a person actually works in a week. A worker’s statutory entitlement is calculated as:
5.6 × days worked per week = statutory days of paid leave
For someone on a standard 5-day week, that’s 5.6 × 5 = 28 days. For a 3-day week it’s 5.6 × 3 = 16.8 days. The weeks figure is the constant; the days-per-week figure is what varies from person to person.
The 28-Day Cap for Full-Time and Longer Working Weeks
Here’s where a lot of people get tripped up. If you scale 5.6 weeks up for someone working 6 or 7 days a week, you’d get 33.6 or 39.2 days. That doesn’t happen — statutory entitlement is capped at 28 days, regardless of how many days a week someone works above 5.
So a worker on a 6-day week and a worker on a 5-day week both get exactly 28 days of statutory leave; the 6-day worker doesn’t get more just because they work more days. The cap only starts to bind once weekly working days exceed 5, since 5.6 × 5 already equals 28 exactly. Below that threshold — 1, 2, 3, or 4 days a week — the plain 5.6-multiplier calculation applies with no cap involved.
Employers are free to offer more than the statutory minimum as a contractual benefit, and many do (28 days is common as a headline figure precisely because it matches the maximum statutory entitlement for a 5-day week). But 28 days, or the pro-rata equivalent for shorter weeks, is the legal floor — it can be topped up, never reduced.
Part-Time and Pro-Rata Entitlement: Worked Examples
Part-time workers get the same 5.6-week multiplier as everyone else, just applied to fewer working days. The formula doesn’t change:
Days per week × 5.6 = statutory holiday entitlement in days
Two common patterns:
- 3 days a week: 3 × 5.6 = 16.8 days. The fraction of a day is real and doesn’t get rounded down — an employer can round up in the worker’s favour, but never down.
- 4 days a week: 4 × 5.6 = 22.4 days.
The same logic extends to any fractional working pattern — 2.5 days a week gives 14 days, 1 day a week gives 5.6 days. If your hours vary by pay period rather than following a fixed weekly pattern, the irregular-hours method below applies instead. For a side-by-side breakdown across different weekly patterns, the pro-rata calculator applies the same scaling logic to pay, hours, and leave together.
Irregular Hours and Part-Year Workers: The 12.07% Method
Not everyone works a fixed number of days each week. Zero-hours workers, casual staff, and others whose hours genuinely vary from one pay period to the next need a different mechanism, because “days per week” isn’t a stable input for them.
For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue statutory holiday at 12.07% of the hours actually worked in each pay period, rounded to the nearest hour. That percentage isn’t arbitrary — it comes directly from the 5.6-week entitlement: a working year has 52 weeks, of which 5.6 are paid leave, leaving 46.4 weeks actually worked. 5.6 ÷ 46.4 = 12.07%, so applying that rate to hours worked reconstructs the same 5.6-week entitlement, just measured in hours rather than days.
Example: a worker paid weekly works 30 hours in a given week. Leave accrued for that week: 30 × 12.07% = 3.62 hours, rounded to 4 hours.
Employers of irregular-hours and part-year workers also have the option to pay rolled-up holiday pay — adding 12.07% of the worker’s pay for the period on top of their normal pay each payslip, rather than paying separately when leave is taken. This must be itemised as a distinct amount on the payslip. The holiday pay calculator can convert either the accrued-hours method or the rolled-up-pay method into a cash figure for a given pay period.
Do Bank Holidays Count Toward the 5.6 Weeks?
There’s no separate statutory right to bank holidays as paid leave. Employers can choose to include the usual bank holidays as part of a worker’s 5.6-week entitlement rather than granting them on top. In practice, many employers land on 28 days made up of 20 days of “ordinary” annual leave plus the 8 bank holidays in England and Wales — but that split is a contractual choice, not a legal requirement. Check your contract or staff handbook to see whether bank holidays are included within your headline leave figure or provided in addition to it.
Starting or Leaving a Job Partway Through the Leave Year
Holiday entitlement doesn’t arrive as a single lump sum on day one of a new job — it accrues over the leave year, and the same accrual logic applies in reverse when someone leaves.
Starting mid-year: in the first year of employment, leave builds up at one-twelfth of the annual entitlement per calendar month worked, rounded up to the nearest half day. Starting partway through a month still earns that month’s twelfth of leave.
Leaving mid-year: accrual is worked out pro-rata to the portion of the leave year actually worked. Whatever statutory leave has accrued but not yet been taken by the last day of employment must be paid out in the final payslip — this is a legal requirement, not something an employer can decline. If a worker has taken more leave than they’ve accrued by the time they leave, an employer can only deduct the difference from final pay if the employment contract explicitly allows it.
Carrying Holiday Over to the Next Leave Year
The default position is that statutory leave should be used within the leave year it’s earned, but there are defined exceptions:
- Basic carry-over: if a worker gets the statutory 28 days, up to 8 days can typically be carried into the next leave year, subject to what the contract allows.
- Sickness and family leave: larger carry-over is permitted when a worker couldn’t take their statutory leave because of sickness absence or family-related leave such as maternity leave. If time off is affected by an extended sickness absence, it’s worth checking entitlement against the statutory sick pay calculator alongside the leave figures, since both accrue during absence. Similarly, holiday continues to accrue throughout maternity leave — the maternity pay calculator is the natural companion when working out combined pay and leave across that period.
- Employer failure to facilitate leave: if an employer didn’t give a worker a reasonable opportunity to take their leave or didn’t tell them it would be lost, additional carry-over protection can apply.
Carry-over rules interact with contract terms, so always check what your specific employer’s policy says on top of the statutory floor.
Statutory vs Contractual Extra Leave
Everything above describes the statutory minimum — the legal floor that applies regardless of what’s written in a contract. Many employers offer more generous terms: extra days for length of service, additional leave as a benefit, or simply a higher headline number than 28 days. That additional leave is contractual, not statutory, which matters because the special protections around statutory leave (like the carry-over rules for sickness) don’t automatically extend to the contractual top-up unless the contract says so. When checking your own entitlement, it’s worth identifying which part of your total is the statutory floor and which part is an employer enhancement, since they can be treated differently in a contract dispute.
Work Out Your Own Entitlement
The rules above cover the general framework, but the exact figure for your situation depends on your specific working pattern — full-time, part-time, a new starter, a leaver, or paid on an irregular-hours basis. The holiday entitlement calculator applies the 5.6-week multiplier, the 28-day cap, first-year monthly accrual, and the 12.07% irregular-hours method to your own numbers and shows the working at each step.