How Much Annual Leave Are UK Employees Entitled To? (2026 Guide)

Working out how much holiday your team is entitled to sounds simple until you factor in part-timers, bank holidays, mid-year starters, and carry-over. This guide breaks down the UK rules in plain English so you can set allowances correctly and avoid the most common mistakes.

The Legal Minimum: 5.6 Weeks

Almost all UK workers are legally entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave per year. This is known as statutory leave entitlement, and it applies to full-time workers, part-time workers, and most agency and casual staff.

The 5.6-week figure is a multiplier, not a fixed number of days. You multiply the number of days an employee works per week by 5.6 to get their annual entitlement.

What 5.6 Weeks Means in Days

For someone working a standard five-day week, 5.6 weeks works out to 28 days of paid annual leave per year (5 × 5.6 = 28). That 28 days is also the statutory cap — employers do not have to provide more than 28 days of statutory leave, even for someone working six days a week.

You are, of course, free to offer more than the statutory minimum as a contractual benefit, and many employers do to stay competitive.

Do Bank Holidays Count as Annual Leave?

This is where confusion creeps in. There is no legal right to take bank holidays off, and there is no automatic right to extra pay for working them. Employers can choose to:

• Include the eight UK bank holidays within the 5.6-week entitlement, or
• Offer them on top of the statutory minimum.

Both are legal. What matters is that the total still meets or exceeds 5.6 weeks and that your policy is written down clearly so there is no ambiguity for staff or payroll.

Part-Time and Irregular-Hours Workers

Part-time workers are entitled to the same 5.6 weeks, calculated pro-rata. Someone working three days a week is entitled to 16.8 days (3 × 5.6).

Workers with irregular hours or who only work part of the year are a special case. Since April 2024, holiday entitlement for these workers can be calculated as 12.07% of the hours they actually work in a pay period. Getting this right by hand is error-prone, which is one of the biggest reasons businesses move off spreadsheets.

Carrying Over Unused Annual Leave

The default position is that statutory leave should be taken within the holiday year it relates to. However, there are situations where carry-over is required or permitted — for example, when an employee could not take leave due to long-term sickness or family-related leave.

A clear written policy should state how many days (if any) can be carried over, and the deadline by which carried-over days must be used before they lapse.

Common Annual Leave Mistakes

• Forgetting pro-rata for mid-year starters, so new joiners get too much or too little.
• Letting bank holidays double-count because the policy never said whether they were included.
• Tracking everything in a spreadsheet that no one updates consistently, leaving balances wrong by year-end.
• No visibility of clashes, so two key people end up booked off the same week.

How Software Keeps You Compliant

Purpose-built annual leave software removes the manual maths. You set the entitlement once — statutory minimum or your own enhanced allowance — and it pro-rates automatically for part-timers and new starters, applies your bank-holiday and carry-over rules, and keeps every balance accurate in real time.

A shared staff holiday planner also gives managers a single view of who is off and when, so clashes are caught before they are approved rather than discovered afterwards.

This guide is general information, not legal advice. Check the current rules at GOV.UK or with an employment law professional for your specific situation.

Getting annual leave right is part fair policy, part accurate tracking. Write the policy down, then let software handle the calculations so your team always knows exactly where they stand.