Holiday Entitlement Calculator

Use the holiday entitlement calculator above

Type in the number of days or hours you work each week, and if relevant the date you started, and the tool returns your statutory paid leave for a full year and pro-rated for a part year. The sections below explain how that result is reached so you can check it against your contract or payslip.

How statutory holiday entitlement works

Under the Working Time Regulations 1998, almost all UK workers are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday each leave year. This is a statutory floor, not a target. Your employer can offer more, but never less. The 5.6 weeks is capped at 28 days for anyone working five or more days a week, because 5.6 multiplied by 5 days is 28.

The core formula for a worker with fixed days is simple:

Annual leave (days) = days worked per week × 5.6, capped at 28 days.

So the number of paid days off rises with the number of days you work, but it stops climbing once you hit the 28-day ceiling. Someone who works six days a week still gets 28 statutory days, not 33.6, because the cap bites. Bank holidays are not a separate legal right: an employer can count the eight England and Wales bank holidays towards your 5.6 weeks, or grant them on top. Always check whether your contract says "28 days including bank holidays" or "plus bank holidays", because the difference is real money and real time off.

For people who work irregular or variable hours, such as casual, zero-hours and many agency staff, leave is built up as you work rather than handed out as a fixed block. The accrual rate is 12.07% of the hours worked, because 5.6 weeks of holiday is 12.07% of the 46.4 working weeks left in the year (5.6 ÷ 46.4 = 0.1207). For each hour worked you accrue just over seven minutes of paid leave.

Worked examples with the maths shown

Example 1: a full-time, five-day worker

Priya works Monday to Friday, five days a week, all year. Her statutory entitlement is 5 × 5.6 = 28 days. Because she works five days a week, that is the capped maximum. If her employer counts the eight bank holidays within that figure, she has 20 days left to book herself; if bank holidays are on top, she effectively has 36 days off.

Example 2: a part-time, three-day worker

Tom works three days a week as a teaching assistant. His entitlement is 3 × 5.6 = 16.8 days of paid holiday a year. Part-timers often feel short-changed when they see a colleague get "28 days", but pro-rata is the law working correctly: Tom gets the same 5.6 weeks, it is simply fewer calendar days because his week is shorter. Employers usually round part-day entitlements up, never down, so 16.8 would typically become 17 days.

Example 3: an irregular-hours worker

Mia is on a zero-hours contract and works 90 hours in a month. Her accrued holiday for that month is 90 × 0.1207 = 10.86 hours of paid leave. Over a year her total tracks her actual hours, which is fairer than a fixed allowance when shifts swing month to month. When she takes that leave it is paid at her average weekly pay over the previous 52 paid weeks.

Example 4: starting partway through the leave year

Sam joins a five-day-a-week job on 1 October and the leave year runs to 31 March, so he is there for six of the twelve months. His pro-rated entitlement is 28 × (6 ÷ 12) = 14 days. The same logic applies if you leave mid-year: you are owed pay for any accrued holiday you did not take, which should appear in your final payslip.

Statutory holiday at a glance

The legal minimum and the calculation method are set out by gov.uk in its guide to holiday entitlement, and gov.uk also runs an official holiday entitlement checker. For pay disputes, Acas is the place to go.

How holiday pay is calculated, not just the days

Knowing how many days you are owed is only half the picture; the other half is what each day is worth. If you have fixed hours and fixed pay, a holiday day is paid at your normal daily rate. If your pay varies because of commission, regular overtime, bonuses or shift premiums, holiday pay is based on your average weekly earnings over the previous 52 weeks in which you were paid. That matters: leaving regular overtime out of holiday pay has been the subject of repeated tribunal rulings, and including it can noticeably raise the amount due.

If you want to sanity-check the take-home value of your wages alongside your leave, our take-home pay calculator shows what lands in your account after tax and National Insurance, and the pro-rata salary calculator is handy when your hours or start date mean you are paid for only part of a full-time salary. If overtime makes up a chunk of your pay, the overtime calculator helps you see the gross figure that should feed into holiday pay.

Tips and things to watch

• Check the wording on bank holidays. "28 days including bank holidays" gives you far less free choice than "28 days plus bank holidays". Neither is unlawful as long as the total is at least 5.6 weeks.
• Round in the worker's favour. Part-day entitlements such as 16.8 days are normally rounded up, not down. A contract that rounds down below 5.6 weeks would breach the regulations.
• Carry-over is limited. You can usually carry a small amount of leave into the next year only if your contract allows it, though leave you could not take because of sickness or family leave has stronger protection.
• Sickness and family leave keep accruing. You continue to build up holiday while off sick or on maternity, paternity or shared parental leave. See our maternity leave calculator for how the two interact.
• Leaving a job? Get your accrued pay. Untaken statutory holiday must be paid out in your final wages.

Common mistakes people make

The most frequent error is assuming everyone gets 28 days. That is the figure for a five-day week only; a four-day worker gets 22.4 days and a two-day worker 11.2, all representing the identical 5.6 weeks. The second common slip is forgetting that the 28-day cap means extra working days beyond five do not add holiday. A third is treating bank holidays as an automatic legal right on top of the 5.6 weeks, when they can lawfully be counted within it.

Irregular-hours workers often miss the 12.07% accrual entirely and end up taking unpaid time off when paid leave was available. And anyone leaving mid-year sometimes overlooks the final-payslip pay-out for holiday they accrued but did not use, which can be a meaningful sum. If your leave overlaps with sickness, check our statutory sick pay calculator, since you keep building holiday while signed off.

These figures are estimates for guidance only and are not personal tax or financial advice; for a binding ruling on a specific contract, speak to your employer, Acas or an employment law adviser.

Related calculators

To plan your wider working year, try the notice period calculator if you are moving on, the redundancy pay calculator if your role is at risk, and the pro-rata salary calculator to match your pay to your actual hours.