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I've started a job half way through my company's leave year. How do I work out my entitlement for this year?

All workers are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per year by law. You should also check your contract of employment as some workers will get more than the minimum legal entitlement. Leave is allocated over a period known as a 'leave year', which may be defined in different ways:

  • The leave year may begin on any set date, if this is written in your contract of employment. The most common leave years are April to March and January to December. This is the way that most organisations operate, so you should check your contract, intranet and staff handbook, to see what the arrangements are where you work
  • If the employer does not specify a particular leave year then the law will regard the leave year as beginning on 1 October for workers who started employment before 1st October 1998. For workers who started after 1 October 1998, the year begins on the anniversary of the start of employment.

If you find that you have started at some point during the leave year, your leave for that year will be worked out pro-rata.

For example, if you started at the beginning of November, and your leave year is the first of April, you still have five months until the next leave year. This means you would earn five twelfths of the your full entitlement this year. In this example, if you are entitled to 28 days leave per year, five twelfths would be 11.67 days. The regulations round up fractions to the nearest half day, so this becomes 12 days.

In some cases, your employer may also use an accruals system during the first leave year. If so, then the leave entitlement for the remainder of the first leave year would be built up on a month-by-month basis. Applying this to the example above, a full-time worker who starts a new job with 5 months to go, would be given a leave entitlement based on the following calculation:

  • 11.67 days divided by 5 months gives 2.33 days. But as the entitlement is rounded up to the nearest half day, at the start of the first month you would accrue 2.5 days entitlement, and so on.