Holiday entitlement for part-time workers

Part-time workers get the same 5.6 weeks of paid holiday as full-timers, scaled to the days or hours they work. Three days a week gives 16.8 days a year (3 × 5.6). If your contract gives full-time staff more than the legal minimum, as NHS and council contracts do, you are entitled to a pro-rata share of that larger figure too.

The basic sum

Take the number of days you work each week and multiply by 5.6. That is your statutory minimum.

Days a week	Statutory minimum
4	22.4 days
3	16.8 days
2.5	14 days
2	11.2 days

Employers can round a fraction of a day up but cannot round it down. So 16.8 days can become 17 days, never 16.

If your days are different lengths, days are a clumsy unit. A Monday of 9 hours and a Friday of 4 hours both count as “a day” off, which is unfair one way or the other. Many public sector employers convert the whole entitlement into hours to avoid that, and you then book leave in hours.

Working it out in hours

The method is to take the full-time entitlement in hours and apply your percentage of full-time hours.

Say you work 22.2 hours a week for a council where full-time is 37 hours and the full-time minimum under the Green Book is 33 days (23 days’ leave, 8 public holidays and 2 extra days). A full-time day there is 7.4 hours, so the full-time entitlement is 33 × 7.4 = 244.2 hours. You work 60 per cent of full-time hours, so your entitlement is 60 per cent of 244.2, which is about 146.5 hours, including your share of public holidays. Your employer’s own policy will show the exact figures it uses.

The government’s holiday entitlement calculator does the statutory version of this sum for days, hours and irregular patterns.

Bank holidays for part-timers

This is where most arguments start. There is no legal right to bank holidays off, but where a contract gives public holidays as part of the leave package, part-time staff must get a pro-rata share. Giving them only the bank holidays that happen to fall on their working days would be less favourable treatment if it leaves them worse off.

A common fair method:

1. Work out your total entitlement (annual leave plus public holidays) pro rata, in days or hours.
2. When a bank holiday falls on a day you normally work, the hours for that day are deducted from the total.
3. Whatever is left is yours to book as ordinary leave.

So someone who works Mondays (when most bank holidays fall) and someone who works Wednesdays end up with the same total time off. In the NHS, Agenda for Change gives part-time staff public holidays pro rata in exactly this way.

NHS and council part-timers

Full-time entitlement	Part-time (3 days a week, 60%)
NHS: 27 days + 8 public holidays = 35 days	21 days
NHS after 5 years: 29 + 8 = 37 days	22.2 days
NHS after 10 years: 33 + 8 = 41 days	24.6 days
Green Book minimum: 23 + 8 + 2 = 33 days	19.8 days

The NHS service steps (5 and 10 years of NHS service) and the Green Book step (5 years’ continuous service) apply to part-timers in the same way. Part-time years count in full towards them, not pro rata. Most employers will express these entitlements in hours.

Term-time and irregular hours

If you work term-time only in a school, your holiday is not booked. It is built into your annualised pay, which is spread over 12 months. Our guides to term-time-only work and term-time pay explain the calculation.

If your hours change from week to week (bank, casual or zero-hours work), different rules apply for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. Holiday builds up at 12.07 per cent of the hours you actually work, and your employer may pay it as rolled-up holiday pay with each wage payment. That should be shown as a separate line on your payslip.

Your wider protection as a part-timer

The Part-time Workers Regulations 2000 say you must not be treated less favourably than a comparable full-timer because you work part-time. That covers holiday, pay rates, sick pay, training and access to pension schemes, all on a pro-rata basis. Our guide to part-time workers’ rights covers the rest, and pro rata salary explains how part-time pay is scaled.

If you share a post as a job share, each sharer gets their own pro-rata entitlement and books it separately, though the employer may ask you to coordinate so that the role is covered.

If your employer’s figures look wrong, ask HR to show the calculation in writing. If that does not settle it, ACAS can explain your rights for free, and a union rep can raise it for you.