Holiday
Irregular hours holiday calculator: the 12.07 % accrual
For zero-hours, casual and term-time workers in England, Wales and Scotland, holiday is earned hour by hour: enter the hours of a pay period and see what it adds.
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In Great Britain, a worker whose paid hours are wholly or mostly variable under the contract (an irregular-hours worker), or who is required to work only part of the year with unpaid weeks off (a part-year worker), builds up holiday at 12.07 % of the hours actually worked in each pay period, for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. The leave is credited on the last day of the pay period, and a fraction of an hour is rounded to the nearest whole hour: 30 minutes or more counts as an hour, less counts as nothing. Thirty hours worked in a week gives 3.62 hours, credited as 4. Accrual stops at 28 days in a leave year. The rule is in regulation 15B of the Working Time Regulations 1998, added by SI 2023/1426, which does not extend to Northern Ireland: there, irregular and casual workers still receive 5.6 weeks a year in proportion to the time they work.
Holiday accrued this pay period
12 hours
96.0 hours × 12.07 % = 11.59, rounded to the nearest hour
| Rolled-up holiday pay if your employer uses it | £147.25 |
| If every period looked like this: hours accrued in a year (12 periods) | 144 hours |
| Ceiling in a leave year | 28 days |
Great Britain, leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, for irregular-hours and part-year workers (Working Time Regulations 1998, regs 15B and 16A). Rolled-up pay must appear as its own line on the payslip and be paid with the wages for the work.
Who counts as irregular-hours or part-year
Regulation 15F sets two tests, each applied leave year by leave year.
- Irregular-hours worker: the number of paid hours you will work in each pay period is, under the contract, wholly or mostly variable. Zero-hours and many casual and bank contracts meet it.
- Part-year worker: the contract requires you to work only part of the year, and there are periods of at least 1 week in which you are neither required to work nor paid. Sick leave and statutory leave are ignored when applying this test. A term-time contract with unpaid school holidays is the classic case.
Everyone else, including part-timers on a fixed pattern, stays on the 5.6-week system (holiday entitlement calculator).
Why 12.07 %
The rate is the statutory 5.6 weeks of leave divided by the 46.4 weeks that remain in a year once that leave is taken: 5.6 ÷ 46.4 = 0.1207. Someone who works every one of those weeks therefore ends the year with 5.6 weeks of leave, and someone who works half of them ends with half as much.
| Hours worked in the pay period | × 12.07 % | Credited (nearest hour) |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 3.621 | 4 |
| 96 | 11.587 | 12 |
| 4.5 | 0.543 | 1 |
Pay, leaving and carrying over
Each hour of leave is paid at the normal rate: a week’s pay averaged over the last 52 paid weeks, divided by the average weekly hours of the same weeks (regulation 16(1A)). An employer may instead add 12.07 % to each payslip as rolled-up holiday pay: £1,220 earned in a month carries £147.25 of holiday pay. On leaving, regulation 15E replaces the usual (A × B) − C formula with something simpler: whatever has accrued and not been taken is paid, unless it was already paid as rolled-up holiday pay. Accrued hours can be carried into the next leave year after sickness or statutory leave, or by agreement (regulation 15D).