Can you believe it? It may seem like the last time you blinked it was January but the reality is, 2020 is approaching fast. It’s the turn of a new century, the year of the rat, and your staff are planning to request their holidays. With this in mind it’s worth taking a look at annual leave entitlement, and whether or not it includes those glorious – much-needed – bank holidays.
Believe it or not, you don’t have to give your employees bank holidays as paid leave, meaning quite simply, their entitlement is up to you. However, many employees will raise the question ‘Am I paid for bank holidays?’. So to make sure you’re prepared, let’s take a look at their bank holiday entitlements;
Bank holiday entitlement for part-time and full-time workers
A large portion of the UK population are working part-time, so understandably you will have a lot of individuals asking if they have bank holiday entitlement. Like full-time employees, part-timers have no rights to bank holidays as paid leave.
However, you should treat full-time employees and part-time employees equally, if one is allowed to have paid leave, so should the other.
How do you calculate bank holiday entitlement?
Standard annual leave calculations for your full-time employees (9 to 5’ers), is fairly simple, the beloved part-timers however, is a little more complicated. UK bank holiday entitlement for full-time members of staff is dependent on the type of contract. Legally, you have to give your employees 28 days or 5.6 weeks paid holiday per year. However, this entitlement does not have to include bank holidays.
Pre-warning; the following is about to get mathematical.
Bear the above in mind when you’re calculating part-time entitlements, to do this, first take the 5.6 weeks used in full-time calculations. If the part-timer works two days a week then the calculation is 2 x 5.6 = 11.2, meaning the employee is entitled to 11.2 holiday days. Got it?
Now we’ve calculated total holiday entitlement, we can take a look at bank holidays. As previously mentioned, if you allow some of your employees bank holidays, you should grant this perk to all employees, in the interest of equality. However, this may be tricky because part-time workers, work less hours than full-time employees.
To be able to calculate how may days paid public holiday you can provide to your part-timers, you first need to work out how many your full-timers are entitled. For example, if your full-time employees are getting 8 paid bank holiday days, and they work 40 hours per week, they will receive 64 hours’ worth of bank holidays. The calculation is: 8 days x 8 hours = 64 hours.
If your part-time employees work two days per week, you will have to do the following calculation: 16 / 40 x 64 = 25.6 (rounded up to 26 hours) – here’s why: 16 (total hours worked per week) divided by 40 (maximum hours possible per week) x 64 (the entitlement of your full-time staff).
If you follow this formula you will be able to work out what bank holidays your part-time employees are entitled to, here’s a reminder of the formula: Numbers of hours worked per week / number of hours in a full-time week) x (full-time bank holiday entitlement x numbers of hours per working day).
How ever you decide to delegate bank holiday entitlement to your employees, be sure to clearly state it in your employee’s contracts to avoid confusion from the outset. To keep track of annual leave, bank holidays, sick leave and more you can use Holded’s Team application to manage everything in a beautiful, user friendly package.
