Bank Holiday Entitlement in the UK: How to Calculate for All Employees
This article explains how bank holiday entitlement works in the UK and clears up common misconceptions around employees’ rights. It outlines the legal position, the difference between statutory and contractual entitlement, and how to calculate bank holiday allowance for full-time, part-time and irregular-hours staff. The article highlights why a simple day-based system can be unfair and shows how using the 12.07% accrual method ensures consistent, compliant, and pro-rated entitlement for all employees. It also provides best-practice guidance, practical examples, and answers to frequently asked questions to help employers manage holiday entitlement accurately and fairly.
While calculating bank holiday entitlement is straightforward for full-time staff, managing bank holiday entitlement for irregular hours and part-time workers is more complex. Because bank holidays often fall on days when these employees don’t work, using a simple calendar-based system can unfairly disadvantage them compared with full-time staff, who benefit from every bank holiday. To ensure fairness, part-time and irregular hours employees should have their entitlement calculated using the accrual method. This method (explained in more detail below) ensures they receive a pro-rated share of bank holiday entitlement equivalent to a full-time worker.
What is Bank Holiday Entitlement in the UK?
Bank holiday entitlement is an often-misunderstood area of UK employment law.
Many employees assume they are automatically entitled to paid time off on every bank holiday, but this isn’t the case as explained here on the UK Government Holiday Entitlement Legal Guide.
While there are 8 bank holidays each year in England and Wales, employees are not legally entitled to paid leave on a bank holiday.
Employees become entitled to paid bank holiday leave if their employment contract includes it as part of their 5.6 weeks’ statutory holiday entitlement. The statement would read something like:
“Employees are entitled to 28 days paid holiday composed of 20 days annual leave and 8 bank holidays”
Some more generous organisations might include bank holidays as paid additional days on top of statutory holiday entitlement, creating a contractual not statutory entitlement to paid bank holiday entitlement. The wording might read something like:
“Employees are entitled to 28 days paid annual leave plus an additional 8 days bank holiday paid at your normal rate of pay”
If a business doesn’t clearly explain how bank holidays are treated within its holiday policy or contracts, confusion and disputes can easily follow.
In this article, we will outline how bank holiday entitlement works, how to calculate it for full-time, part-time and irregular hours workers, and how to avoid common pitfalls when designing UK employee holiday rules.
How Many Bank Holidays Do Employees Get in the UK?
In the simplest terms, UK employees are entitled to take a day off work on bank holidays in the UK. There are 8 official bank holidays, and these are shown below with 2026 dates for reference.
Bank holiday entitlement UK 2026
- Thursday, January 1 – New Year’s Day
- Friday, April 3 – Good Friday
- Monday, April 6 – Easter Monday
- Monday, May 4 – Early May bank holiday
- Monday, May 25 – Spring bank holiday
- Monday, August 31 – Summer bank holiday
- Friday, December 25 – Christmas Day
- Monday, December 28 – Boxing Day (substitute day)
Calculating Bank Holiday Entitlement
When calculating bank holiday entitlement part-time and irregular hours workers need to be treated differently but not unfavourably when compared to comparative full-time workers. Otherwise, this could risk breaching the Part-Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000.
Full-time-equivalent
Calculating bank holiday entitlement for a regular full-time employee working five days a week, Monday to Friday is straightforward. These employees receive 8 days of bank holiday per year.
Part-time or irregular workers
When dealing with part-time or irregular hours workers, this becomes more complicated, as the ‘day based’ bank holiday system can disadvantage this worker type compared to full-time workers, which is a breach of employment regulation as asserted above.
This unfavourable treatment happens if a bank holiday falls on a day when a part-timer or irregular worker doesn’t work and they do not receive bank holiday pay whereas their full-time counterparts do.
Employers can overcome this issue and ensure that part-timers and irregular hours are treated fairly by calculating their bank holiday entitlement using an accrual method like what is used with annual leave entitlement.
Calculating bank holiday entitlement via the accrual method
This system enables part-time and irregular-hours employees to accrue a proportion of bank holiday based on the hours they work. This is done using the statutory holiday uplift of 12.07% in the following formula to calculate bank holiday entitlement for irregular hours workers.
Holiday entitlement (in hours) = Hours worked in the pay period × 12.07%
Part-time or irregular hours workers then use this annual leave entitlement flexibly as they choose, equalising their bank holiday entitlement with full-timers.
Unlike the day-based method, the accruals approach provides fair, pro-rated holiday pay for everyone, regardless of work schedule.
Best Practices for Managing Bank Holiday Entitlement UK
Given the potential for unfavourable treatment of part-time and irregular hours workers versus full-time equivalent, employers should use an accrual method for tracking their bank holidays, ensuring that part-timers etc. receive a fair pro-rated bank holiday entitlement. The employment contract should explain this holiday accrual method for part-time or irregular workers.
As we have explained, there are many pitfalls in the process of managing bank holiday entitlement and the biggest one is the inaccurate calculation and dispersal of accrued bank holiday entitlement for irregular hours workers and part-time workers. This can be overcome by using HR software for tracking bank holidays as this automates the accrual, calculation and dispersal process.
Bank holiday entitlement can be an area of confusion for employees. To ensure clarity, best practice dictates that employment contracts should make the following clear:
- Statutory holiday entitlement UK (28 days)
- Enhanced/Contractual holiday allowance (any paid holiday provided over 28 days)
- Whether bank holidays are included in the statutory allowance or part of the enhanced/contractual allowance
In practice the wording might look like something like this:
(For illustrative purposes only)
“Employees are entitled to 28 days statutory leave composed of 20 days annual leave and 8 public holidays. Employees are entitled to an additional 8 days’ contractual/enhanced annual leave.
“Employees’ total paid annual leave is 28 days plus 8 paid public holidays.”
FAQs
There are 8 bank holidays each year in England and Wales. However, under UK employee holiday rules, there is no automatic legal right to paid time off on a bank holiday. Employees are only entitled to bank holiday leave if their contract includes it, either as:
part of their 5.6 weeks’ statutory holiday entitlement, or
additional paid days on top of statutory leave.
Whatever approach an employer takes, bank holidays must be handled consistently and fairly for both full-time and part-time employees.
Full-time employees normally receive 8 bank holidays per year. However, this “days off” approach doesn’t work fairly for part-time or irregular-hours workers, because the bank holidays may not fall on their working days.
To ensure a fair approach to bank holiday entitlement part-time and irregular-hours staff accrue a proportion of holiday based on the hours they work. This is done using the statutory holiday uplift of 12.07%, provided by the government here.
Calculation: Holiday entitlement (in hours) = Hours worked in the pay period × 12.07%
This ensures everyone receives a fair, pro-rated amount of holiday, regardless of their working pattern. These calculations can be time-consuming if done manually and are typically performed using HR software for tracking bank holidays.
UK employee holiday rules state that an employee is only entitled to take a bank holiday off if they would normally work on that day and their contract includes paid bank holidays. If a bank holiday falls on a day the employee does not normally work, they are not automatically entitled to that specific day off, but they should still receive an equivalent benefit if full-time staff do.
To keep things fair, many employers give part-time and irregular-hours flexible paid leave instead. These additional days can be used at any time and ensures they receive a pro-rated share of bank holiday entitlement.
It depends on which days you normally work. You only get a bank holiday off (and receive pay) if it falls on a day you’re scheduled to work.
For example, in 2026 there are bank holidays on five Mondays and two Fridays. So, if you normally work Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you’d receive seven bank holidays that year.
However, to make things fair for part-time staff, many employers use a pro-rated bank holiday allowance. This means you get a fair proportion of the full-time bank holiday entitlement based on your weekly hours.
So if you work 60% of full-time hours, you’d receive 60% of the annual 8 day bank holiday entitlement (for example, 4.8 days or the equivalent in hours).
This depends on how your employer manages holiday entitlement. If full-time staff receive paid time off on bank holidays, then part-time or irregular-hours workers who don’t work Mondays should still receive an equivalent benefit. This is because the law says part-time workers must not be treated less favourably than full-time colleagues.
In practice, the fairest way to do this is to let part-time and irregular-hours staff accrue holiday based on the hours they work at the same rate as full-timers. They then use this paid holiday whenever they choose, rather than only on specific bank holiday dates.
Part-time employees must be treated no less favourably than full-time staff when it comes to bank holiday entitlement. However, a day-based system can be unfair to part-time or irregular-hours workers if they don’t usually work on bank holiday dates.
To avoid this, the fairest approach is to give part-time and irregular-hours staff a pro-rated amount of holiday based on the hours they work. The calculation for this pro-rated holiday entitlement:
Holiday entitlement (in hours) = Total hours worked × 12.07%
This extra holiday is added to their overall allowance, and they can use it whenever they choose. These days such calculations are not performed manually but via an automated holiday entitlement calculator.
When holiday entitlement is based on hours worked, there’s a standard statutory method to follow. All workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per year. When you convert this into an hourly accrual rate, it becomes 12.07% of the hours worked.
This percentage comes from the fact that there are 46.4 working weeks in a year (52 weeks minus the 5.6 weeks of holiday). The calculation therefore is:
Holiday entitlement (in hours) = Total hours worked × 12.07%
This gives you the amount of paid holiday the worker has earned for that pay period.
Yes, part-time employees must not be treated less favourably than full-time staff, and they are entitled to bank holidays on the same basis. In practice, organisations handle this in different ways, but the most common approach is to pro-rate bank holiday entitlement based on the number of hours an employee works.
Instead of only giving time off when a bank holiday happens to fall on their working day, employers often convert bank holiday entitlement into flexible paid holiday, to be used alongside normal annual leave. This gives employees a fair, pro-rated amount that they can use as they please.
For staff who work irregular or unpredictable hours, the usual “day-based” bank holiday system doesn’t work. Instead of receiving specific paid days off, these employees accrue holiday based on the hours they actually work, compared with a full-time employee.
In practice, irregular-hours workers build up holiday at a standard rate of 12.07% of the hours worked. So to calculate their entitlement for any period, you do this simple calculation:
Total hours worked × 12.07% = holiday entitlement (in hours)
This method ensures the employee receives the correct amount of paid holiday, regardless of how varied their working pattern is. For efficiency purposes and to eliminate errors, such calculations are normally performed automatically in a bank holiday entitlement calculator that is part of HR software for tracking bank holidays.
This depends on the individual employment contract. Under UK employee holiday rules, workers are entitled to 28 days statutory leave and this can include the statutory 8 day bank holiday entitlement. However, in practice most employees clearly separate annual leave entitlement (flexible) from bank holiday entitlement (fixed days) in the employment contract. Typical wording might be employees are entitled to 25 days annual leave and 8 bank holidays. This avoids confusion.
If an employee takes sick leave on a bank holiday (and they are entitled to be paid for that holiday either through statutory or contractual obligations), they are entitled to take the ‘lost’ leave entitlement later.
If you are on unpaid parental leave during a bank holiday you will continue to accrue statutory or any contractually enhanced bank holiday entitlement.
