How do I work out my holiday entitlement, and take account of the extra holiday from October 1 2007?

If you are an employee, your contract of employment should specify your entitlement to annual holidays. This can only be the same or better than the legal minimum that we explain in the rest of this answer.

The law gives all workers, including part time workers, a minimum entitlement of 4.8 weeks paid holiday. This builds up from your first day of employment. This will go up to 5.6 weeks from April 1 2009.

You can work out how many days off you should get from October 1 2007 by multiplying the number of days you work each week by 4.8.

So workers who are contracted to work five days a week must get at least 24 days off a year (5 x 4.8) including public holidays.

If you are contracted to work three days a week then your new leave entitlement will be 13.2 days off a year (3 x 4.8).

From April 1 2009, you multiply your working week by 5.6, so five-day-a-week workers will then enjoy 28 days.

If you currently work six days a week you should already be entitled to 24 days. This however will remain a maximum entitlement until April 1 2009, so you will not get an increase in your time off until then, when the maximum rises to 28 days.

A small number of workers are still contracted to work seven days per week. This is illegal, European rules say that workers must have at least one full day of rest a week (though they can be taken as two days off every fortnight).

Working out the leave entitlement is a very simple calculation for those whose leave year starts on October 1.

But not everyone has their leave calculated from October to October. If the new rules come into force during your leave year, you will still get a boost to your minimum entitlement.

Your extra leave will depend on how much of your leave year falls after the change date. If you have an April to April leave year, for example, half your leave year falls after October 1 and therefore you will get half of your full extra entitlement. For a five-day-a-week worker this would be an extra two days.

Those whose leave years start on 1 January will get one quarter of the extra entitlement in the leave year that ends on 31 December 2007 (eg 21 days for five-day-a-week workers).

There are no rules on how employers should deal with part days, so they could insist that a worker takes, say 0.73 of a days leave.

However, the TUC's strong advice is that it would be more sensible for employer simply to round-up entitlements to the nearest half-day. A cost of the small extra increase in entitlements is likely to be outweighed by the benefit of having a simple system that is easy to understand and to monitor.

Many people have contractual entitlements that are much better than the statutory minimum. The average GB full-time worker gets 25 days leave plus 8 bank holidays. Trade union members tend to do better than those who aren't members. Comparing like for like across occupations industries and public and private sectors the average union member gets 2 days more leave than comparable non-members.