If you have questions about annual leave entitlement or your company’s rules around taking holidays, your first point of call should always be your Contract of Employment and then the Employee Handbook, if you have one.
Whilst there is a statutory minimum holiday entitlement, also known as Euro Leave, many employers do now offer more than this and, if that is the case, your annual leave is a contractual right, which is why you should always check your contract first.
So what is Euro Leave? What are you entitled to as a minimum? Under Euro Leave all employees are entitled to 5.6 weeks annual leave each year including bank holidays which, if you work 5 days a week is 28 days – 20 days plus 8 bank holidays.
Unless stated in your contract though, there is no automatic right to have bank holidays off, in fact for many businesses, these can be the busiest days of the year. If you do work a bank holiday, you should be allowed to take the holiday at a different time.
If you work part time, say 3 days per week, you are still entitled to 5.6 weeks holiday but that will be based on a 3 day week so 16.8 days. This includes a pro rata allowance for bank holidays so if your company doesn’t work bank holidays and one of your normal working days falls on a bank holiday, you would need to use one of your holidays for this day. If, however, you would not normally work on that day you don’t have to use a holiday but you obviously wouldn’t be paid for it.
It’s worth noting that people who work 6 days a week are still only entitled to 28 days holiday but remember, this is only for calculating holiday entitlement. The Good Work Plan legislation that comes into effect on 6 April sets out the right to use a pay reference period of 52 weeks when calculating holiday pay so your holiday day rate should work out as an average of daily amount earned over the previous 52 weeks. Please remember that “entitlement” and “pay” are calculated differently.
The legislation only stipulates that employees are allowed this amount of time to rest away from work and, contrary to popular belief, the employer is allowed to decide when you take your holidays. This may be by implementing set holidays or to offset unexpectedly quiet periods in the business. This can be done at relatively short notice as the employer only has to give you twice as much notice as the amount of holiday they want you to take – for example, you would need to be given 2 weeks’ notice for your employer to ask you to take a week’s holiday.
If your employer only offers Euro Leave you cannot be paid in lieu for untaken holidays except upon termination of employment.
You and your manager between you, should ensure you take all of your holidays in the year they are allocated, with the emphasis being on you to make sure this happens but, if you are genuinely unable to take some of your holidays, you should be allowed to carry over Euro Leave from one year to the next. Your employer has the right to insist this carried over holiday is taken very early into the new holiday year. If your employer offers more than just Euro Leave you may not be allowed to carry over untaken days if you have taken the Euro Leave days and this is where you may hear the term “use it or lose it.”
If, however, you have been unable to take your annual leave because you’ve been off on long term sick or on maternity leave or shared parental leave, you should be able to carry over any unused holidays.
Annual leave entitlement must be shown in the employment contract so do check there first to understand your own entitlement and your company’s rules around it – remember most of the above applies to Euro Leave only.
