Question

How do I calculate holiday pay for an employee who works 2 days a week?

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I have an employee who works 2 days a week for me — Tuesdays and Thursdays — at £95 a day, and I want to make sure I'm calculating her holiday entitlement correctly. I've heard part-time staff get a pro-rata amount of the full-time entitlement, but the exact maths confuses me.

 

Does it also matter that some weeks include bank holidays? And when she takes a day off, should she simply be paid her normal daily rate? I want to make sure she gets exactly what she's entitled to and that I don't make a mess of it.

1 Answer

Yes — the maths is straightforward once you start from the statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year and pro-rate it. Working 2 days a week, she gets 2 × 5.6 = 11.2 days of paid leave a year (many employers round that up to 11.5 or 12 days to keep things simple). When she takes a day off, she is paid exactly what she would have earned — her normal £95 daily rate — so a full year's entitlement is worth 11.2 × £95. Bank holidays are not extra on top: the 5.6 weeks already includes the 8 UK bank holidays, so if a bank holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday and she doesn't work, it simply counts as one of her 11.2 days. The 12.07% accrual method (5.6 ÷ 46.4) is for genuinely irregular-hours or part-year workers — for a fixed 2-day pattern like hers, the fixed 11.2-day entitlement is cleaner and easier to track. One caution: don't substitute a rolled-up hourly uplift for actual time off on a regular pattern like this; the leave should be taken and paid at the normal daily rate.

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