UK Holiday Entitlement Calculator

1. Choose how you work: a fixed number of days, a fixed number of hours (including compressed hours), a repeating shift pattern, or irregular hours and part-year work.
2. Choose the period. A full leave year needs no dates. If you started or are leaving part way through, enter your leave year start date (it is in your contract, and is often 1 January or 1 April) and the date you started or are leaving.
3. Enter your days, hours or shift pattern. For irregular hours, type the hours worked in each pay period from your payslips.
4. If your employer counts bank holidays as part of your leave, enter how many fall on your working days to see what is left to book.

The result shows days and hours, the steps behind them and a note whenever the figure has been rounded. Everything is worked out in your browser.

Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks a year for almost everyone classed as a worker, whether full-time or part-time. For a 5-day week that is 28 days. The legal minimum is capped at 28 days, so someone working 6 days a week also gets 28, not 33.6. Hours-based figures follow the same rule: 5.6 weeks times the hours in your working week, counting no more than 5 days.

Bank and public holidays do not have to be given as paid leave. An employer can include them in the 5.6 weeks, which is why many full-time contracts say "20 days plus bank holidays". Your contract can give more than the statutory minimum but never less. Employers may round leave up but cannot round it down.

The figures come from GOV.UK: Holiday entitlement, Calculate leave entitlement and the GOV.UK holiday entitlement calculator, whose rounding this tool copies.

Starting: you get one-twelfth of the full-year figure for each month of the leave year you are employed, counting the month you start in. The result is rounded up to the nearest half day (or half shift).

Leaving, or starting and leaving in the same year: the full-year figure is multiplied by the days you were employed divided by the days in the leave year (366 if it includes 29 February). There is no half-day rounding here; the result is shown to one decimal place, rounded up. Any leave you have built up but not taken should be paid in your final pay.

You are an irregular-hours worker if the paid hours in each pay period are wholly or mostly variable, such as a zero-hours contract. You are a part-year worker if you have weeks in the year when you do not work and are not paid, such as term-time only. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, both build up holiday at 12.07% of the hours actually worked in each pay period. The figure is 5.6 weeks divided by the 46.4 weeks left to work in a year.

Each pay period is rounded to the nearest whole hour, with half an hour or more rounding up, and the leave can be used from the next pay period. Rounding happens per period, so four 4-hour weeks give no leave at all, while one 16-hour week gives 2 hours. Leave cannot add up to more than 5.6 weeks in a leave year. Employers may instead pay rolled-up holiday pay of 12.07% on top of each payment. See the GOV.UK guidance on the 2024 reforms.

For a repeating shift pattern, the calculator finds your average shifts per week (shifts in the pattern ÷ days in the pattern × 7) and multiplies by 5.6. Four 12-hour shifts on and four off is 4 shifts in 8 days, or 3.5 a week, giving 19.6 shifts of 12 hours. Patterns of more than 5 shifts a week are counted as 5, keeping the 28-day cap.