Why this catches employers out
There are plenty of bank holidays across 2026, which means the same questions will keep coming up for employers. What do you do with part time staff? What happens if someone does not usually work Mondays? How do you deal with holiday for people whose hours change from week to week?
This is where things can get messy. Not because the rules are impossible to understand, but because holiday arrangements are often badly worded in contracts, applied inconsistently, or based on a system nobody has reviewed for years.
A lot of people assume staff are automatically entitled to bank holidays off on top of their annual leave. That is not the case. Workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday each year. Bank holidays can be included within that entitlement, or an employer can choose to give them in addition. The important thing is what the contract says.
There is a real difference between 20 days plus bank holidays and 28 days including bank holidays. Those two arrangements are not the same, and if the wording is unclear, confusion usually follows quite quickly.
Part timers and bank holidays
The issue is often less about the bank holiday itself and more about whether the overall entitlement is fair.
Take a part timer who works Tuesday to Thursday. If most bank holidays fall on a Monday and the business closes on those days, a full timer may seem to get the benefit every time while the part timer gets very little. If holiday has not been calculated properly on a pro rata basis, that can cause problems.
Part time workers are still entitled to 5.6 weeks’ holiday, just reduced in line with the number of days or hours they work. So, for example, someone who works 3 days a week is entitled to 16.8 days’ holiday a year.
Where employers go wrong is treating bank holidays as though they only matter if they fall on a day the employee normally works. That can leave part time staff at a disadvantage if the arrangement is not backed up by a fair pro rata calculation overall. If full time staff receive the benefit of bank holidays through the way leave is structured, part time staff need an equivalent entitlement on a pro rata basis.
In many cases, hours work better than days. For staff with a fixed pattern, calculating holiday in days may be perfectly fine. But where someone works longer days, shorter days, compressed hours or a pattern that changes, using hours is often much easier and much fairer.
It also makes bank holidays easier to manage. If the business closes on a bank holiday and that employee would normally have worked 6 hours that day, you deduct 6 hours from their holiday balance. If they would not normally have worked that day, you would not deduct anything, but their annual entitlement still needs to have been set correctly in the first place.
Irregular hours and common mistakes
For workers whose hours vary, holiday calculations need more care. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, irregular hours workers and part year workers generally accrue holiday at 12.07 per cent of the hours worked in each pay period.
So if someone works variable shifts each month, their entitlement should be based on the hours they have actually worked, not a rough estimate and not whatever was done for someone with a completely different pattern. This often applies to casual workers, zero hours staff and other workers whose hours are not fixed.
Even where entitlement has been worked out properly, employers still need to think about how holiday pay is calculated. If someone’s pay varies, holiday pay may need to reflect their average pay rather than just their basic hourly rate. That is especially important where overtime or variable shifts are part of normal earnings.
We still see the same issues coming up again and again. Contracts that are out of date or unclear. Payroll and managers applying different rules in practice. Part timers only getting bank holidays if they happen to be rostered on that day. Irregular hours staff being squeezed into a system designed for fixed hours employees. And sometimes the biggest problem is simply that nobody can clearly explain how the calculation works when an employee asks.
If the answer is vague, that is usually a sign the process needs looking at.
A good time to review it
With Easter, the May bank holidays and the summer bank holiday all coming round in 2026, this is a good point to review how holiday is being handled.
Check what contracts say about bank holidays, whether part time staff are receiving a fair pro rata entitlement, and whether holiday would be better tracked in hours rather than days. If you have staff with irregular hours, it is also worth checking that the accrual method and holiday pay calculation are up to date.
Holiday entitlement is one of those things that often gets left until someone queries it. By that point, it is usually more awkward than it needed to be. If you have part timers, variable hours staff or contracts that have not been reviewed for a while, now is a sensible time to check that everything stacks up before the busy run of bank holidays really kicks in.