Working out part-time holiday entitlement

The simple version, and where it stops being simple

The standard approach is to scale the full-time allowance by the days worked. Somebody working three days a week gets three fifths of what a five-day colleague gets. Take the United Kingdom's statutory 28 days as the full-time figure: three days a week comes to 16.8 days, usually rounded to 17. Check what applies where you are — the full-time figure is different in most countries.

That is correct, and it is what most guidance in the United Kingdom and the European Union will tell you. It holds up until public holidays enter the picture.

In the United Kingdom the statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks — 28 days for a five-day week, well above the EU floor of four weeks — and an employer is allowed to count the bank holidays inside it rather than on top. England and Wales have eight in a normal year, Scotland has nine or ten depending on the year, and Northern Ireland has ten. Those days are not spread evenly across the week: a large share of them fall on a Monday.

So somebody who works Mondays gets a disproportionate share of free bank holidays, and somebody who works Wednesday to Friday gets almost none. Scale the allowance and nothing else, and the Monday worker is quietly better off than the Wednesday one.

The two ways people fix it

Give the allowance in hours. Convert everybody's allowance to hours, deduct the hours actually taken, and the day-of-the-week problem disappears because a day is no longer the unit. This is tidy, and it is what bigger companies tend to do. It is also harder to read: an answer given to two decimal places in hours is a true answer to a question nobody asked.

Count only the days somebody works. Give the pro-rated allowance in days, and then only ever deduct a day when it is a day that person actually works. A public holiday falling on a Monday costs the Wednesday-to-Friday person nothing, because it was never one of their days in the first place — and it costs the Monday person nothing either, because the chart never counts a public holiday against anyone.

The second is what Leavebook does, and it is why nobody has to enter a fraction. The chart knows which weekdays each person works. A request from Thursday to the following Wednesday costs a five-day person four days and a Monday-Tuesday-Thursday person two, and neither number was typed by anyone.

Where the law sits, and where it does not

In the United Kingdom and the European Union it is worth being precise about what is a rule and what is only a convention.

The statutory minimum is a rule. In the United Kingdom it is 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days. Across the EU, the Working Time Directive sets four weeks as the floor. Ireland gives four weeks with ten public holidays separate from it; Germany sets 24 Werktage, which is 20 working days in a five-day week; Norway gives 25 virkedager, which is 21 working days in a five-day week, though most Norwegian contracts give five full weeks. Australia and New Zealand both give four weeks.

In the United Kingdom and across the European Union, the principle that part-time staff should not be treated less favourably than comparable full-time staff is also a rule.

In the United Kingdom, and in the EU countries above, how you convert, whether you round up or down, and whether public holidays sit inside the allowance or on top are mostly conventions rather than statute, and they are usually written into contracts. That is where to look for your answer, and check what applies where you are. This page describes what those statutes say and how the counting works; it is not advice about your contracts, and a genuinely contested case is one for somebody who gives that advice for a living.

Setting it up in practice

Open the team panel, tick the weekdays each person works, and the suggestion appears: the full-time allowance scaled to their pattern, rounded to the nearest half day. Take it, or type the number you actually agreed with them.

From then on the chart does the counting. Their row greys out the days they do not work, so you can see at a glance that Thursday is not one of Ingrid's days. Their balance only moves on days that were really theirs to take. And if you would rather work in hours after all, switch the whole board to hours and set how long a day is — the same counting, shown in the other unit.