Holiday pay calculator

When a job ends, any statutory holiday you have earned but not taken must be paid out as a payment in lieu of holiday (Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 14). The sum is simple. Take your yearly entitlement, multiply it by the share of the year that had passed on your termination date, and subtract the days you have already taken. What is left is paid at a day's pay. A worker on £35,000.00 a year, five days a week, who leaves 26 weeks into the holiday year has earned 14 days of the 28. With 5 days taken, 9 remain. A day's pay is £134.62, so the payment is £1,211.58 before tax. It goes through payroll like wages, so roughly 72% of it, £872.33, reaches a basic rate taxpayer. The same method applies whether you resign, are dismissed or are made redundant.

The calculator counts time in weeks, so it works the pro rata share as weeks worked out of 52. Government guidance counts days instead, the days employed over the days in the year, which can move the answer by a fraction of a day. The rules say nothing about rounding a leaver's days, and Acas says part days must never be rounded down. The figures here are kept to two decimals.

The result is checked against Acas's own worked example of a leaver, listed with the other checked cases further down.

The statutory holiday entitlement is 5.6 weeks a year, capped at 28 days (Working Time Regulations 1998, regulations 13 and 13A). For a five day week that is exactly 28 days. Bank holidays count within it: an employer may give them as part of the 5.6 weeks or on top. A part-time worker gets the same number of weeks, so the days scale with the days worked each week.

Contractual holiday above the statutory minimum is only paid out on leaving if your contract says so, which most do. Enter those extra days separately and the calculator adds them before applying the pro rata share. A three day worker on £21,000.00 who leaves at the same point has earned 8.4 days, each worth £134.62.

The leave year is whatever your contract sets, often the calendar year or April to March. Without a written date it starts on the anniversary of your start date. If you joined part way through, count the weeks from your first day.

Holiday is paid at a week's pay for each week of leave (Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 16), a sum the Employment Rights Act 1996 defines. On a fixed salary it is the yearly salary divided by 52. A day's pay is that week divided by the days you work in a week. For a five day week this equals dividing the salary by 260 working days.

Some employers divide by 365 calendar days, which gives a lower day rate. The Employment Appeal Tribunal rejected that approach in Leisure Leagues v Maconnachie (2002): holiday replaces working days, so it is valued by them.

If your pay varies, a week's pay is the average over a 52-week reference period of weeks in which you were paid, counting back up to 104 weeks. For the first four weeks of statutory leave it must include regular overtime, commission and pay linked to seniority. Enter the salary that reflects your normal pay, not just the basic rate, if these make up a steady part of it.

Irregular hours workers and part-year workers build up holiday at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period (Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 15B). This applies to leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024. The figure is 5.6 weeks of holiday spread over the 46.4 weeks a full-time worker is at work. It replaced the older averaging over a year after the Supreme Court's decision in Harpur Trust v Brazel.

In this mode, enter the hours worked so far this year, the hours of holiday taken and your average hourly pay. After 800 hours of work, a worker has built up 96.56 hours of holiday. With 40 taken and pay of £13.50 an hour, the payout is £763.56. Someone on a zero-hours contract is usually an irregular hours worker.

Employers of these workers may use rolled-up holiday pay instead: an extra 12.07% on every payslip, shown as a separate line. Holiday paid that way has already been paid, so nothing more is owed for it when the job ends.

Carried-over leave from an earlier year is paid out as well. Up to 8 days of the extra 1.6 weeks can be carried over by agreement. Leave missed through sickness or family leave can also be carried, as can leave the employer never gave you a real chance to take. Add those days in the carried over field: with 3 days carried, the example leaver's payment rises to £1,615.44.

The opposite case is holiday taken before it was earned. If the example leaver had taken 16 days, they would be 2 days ahead, and the calculator shows no payment. Your employer can only claw that back through a deduction from final pay if a relevant agreement, usually your contract, allows it, and you agreed in writing before the deduction.

Holiday pay on leaving is earnings, so it is taxed through PAYE and carries National Insurance like any other wages (HMRC). It is normally added to your final pay, which is why that payslip can look heavily taxed. For a basic rate taxpayer the £1,211.58 payment loses £242.32 to tax and £96.93 in contributions. On a £60,000.00 salary, £830.77 of a £2,076.93 payment goes in tax.

The estimate runs the payout through a full year of pay at your salary, with the standard tax code and no student loan or pension. It is close to what cumulative PAYE takes. The salary calculator covers the rest of a payslip, including tax codes, pensions and loans.

If the payment reaches you after your P45 was issued, payroll must use tax code 0T on a non-cumulative basis, with National Insurance worked out as a weekly payment. That can overtax it at first; any excess comes back through a new employer or HMRC after the tax year.

You keep building up holiday throughout your notice period, since your employment continues until the termination date. An employer can require you to take some or all of it during notice, if it gives notice of its own at least twice as long as the leave. Days used that way reduce the payout.

The payment is due with your final pay. Since 6 April 2026 employers must keep holiday records for 6 years. If the money does not arrive, Acas early conciliation is the first step, and a claim can then go to an employment tribunal.

The estimate follows the statutory rules for Great Britain, so a few situations that change the payment fall outside it.

• Northern Ireland, which has its own regulations with a 12 week reference period for variable pay.
• Contract terms that pay more than the statutory formula, or that set a different leaving formula through a relevant agreement.
• Bonuses paid on leaving, student loan repayments and pension contributions, which change the net but not the holiday owed.
• Rounding of irregular hours in each pay period: 12.07% is applied here to the total hours.