Paid time off granted to employees each year for rest and personal use.
Annual leave is the paid time off a worker is entitled to take each year. In the UK the statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year — at least 28 days for someone working a five-day week. Because the entitlement is set in weeks rather than days, part-time and irregular patterns are calculated by multiplying the pattern worked, not by scaling a fixed day count.
Statutory annual leave in the UK is expressed as 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year, and a "week" means whatever a working week means for that particular worker. Multiply the number of days someone normally works in a week by 5.6 and you have their entitlement in days. For a five-day week that produces at least 28 days' paid annual leave a year, which is where the familiar figure of 28 comes from. It is a result, not the rule — and treating it as the rule is what makes almost every part-time calculation wrong.
The cap bites at the other end of the scale. Statutory paid holiday entitlement is limited to 28 days, so someone working six days a week is entitled to 28 days rather than the 33.6 the multiplication produces. Measured in weeks they receive less than a colleague on a five-day pattern. It is the one point at which the 5.6-week principle stops scaling.
Statutory annual leave = days normally worked per week × 5.6, capped at 28 days. Working in hours: weekly hours × 5.6.
| Days normally worked each week | Statutory annual leave |
|---|---|
| 2 days | 11.2 days |
| 3 days | 16.8 days |
| 4 days | 22.4 days |
| 5 days | 28 days |
| 6 days | 28 days (capped) |
A worker on three days a week is entitled to 3 × 5.6 = 16.8 days. Someone working 20 hours a week across variable shifts is entitled to 20 × 5.6 = 112 hours. The hours version is the more robust of the two, because a "day" of leave is not a fixed quantity once shift lengths vary: booking a ten-hour shift off and booking a four-hour shift off both cost one day in a day-based system, and the worker on the long shift quietly loses out.
Fractions such as 16.8 are awkward to administer and the temptation is to round to the nearest half day. Round up. Rounding down puts the worker below the 5.6 weeks the entitlement is built on, and the same instinct applied monthly — trimming each month's accrual to a tidy figure — compounds into a materially short balance by the end of the leave year.
When someone changes working pattern mid-year, recalculate rather than carry the balance across. Leave already taken should be valued against the pattern it was taken under, and the remainder of the year calculated on the new one. Moving a raw day count across the change inflates or shrinks the entitlement depending on which direction the change went, and nobody notices until the year end.
An employer can choose to include bank holidays as part of a worker's statutory annual leave. That single fact explains most of the confusion in job offers. Twenty-eight days inclusive of bank holidays is the statutory minimum for a five-day week and nothing more; the same 28 days with bank holidays granted on top is a materially better package. Candidates compare the headline number and rarely the wording underneath it.
The second thing to settle in policy is what happens to part-timers when the workplace closes on a bank holiday. A worker whose days never coincide with those closures gains nothing from them, while a colleague who works the days they fall on effectively gains a day off each time. Employers commonly defuse that lottery by converting bank holidays into a pro-rated allocation of hours added to everyone's pot, so the benefit follows the pattern worked rather than the accident of which weekdays someone happens to be rostered on.
Entitlement runs per leave year, so anyone joining or leaving part-way through receives a proportion of it. A five-day-week joiner starting exactly halfway through the leave year is entitled to 28 × 0.5 = 14 days for that year. The arithmetic is trivial; the errors come from systems that credit a full year's allowance on day one, which looks generous until a leaver has taken more than they had accrued and the difference has to be recovered from final pay.
The figure most likely to mislead is the balance itself, because it is one number standing in for several: entitlement for the year, leave already taken, leave approved but not yet taken, and any part-year proportion. A balance that ignores approved future bookings invites a team to double-book the same fortnight. A balance shown only in days, for a workforce on mixed patterns, is not comparable between two people sitting next to each other.
Multiply the number of days you normally work each week by 5.6. Three days a week gives 16.8 days and four days gives 22.4 days. If your shifts vary in length, run the same calculation in hours instead — 20 hours a week gives 112 hours — because a balance held in days treats a long shift and a short one as the same cost.
They can. An employer can choose to include bank holidays as part of a worker's statutory annual leave, so a contract offering 28 days inclusive of bank holidays meets the 5.6-week minimum for a five-day week without giving any extra days off on top. Check whether your contract says "including" or "plus" — the same headline number describes two very different packages.
Because statutory paid holiday entitlement is limited to 28 days. The 5.6-week calculation would give a six-day worker 33.6 days, but the cap holds the statutory figure at 28, so they are entitled to the same number of days as someone on a five-day week. An employer is free to offer more than the statutory minimum contractually.
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