About Holiday Hours
Holiday Hours is a free, independent set of UK annual-leave, working-hours and bank-holiday calculators — built to give clear, accurate answers to the everyday questions employees and employers actually ask.
What Holiday Hours is
Working out holiday entitlement in the UK is fiddlier than it should be — part-time pro-rata, irregular and part-year hours, bank-holiday top-ups, mid-year joiners and leavers, and different rules across England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Holiday Hours turns each of these into a simple, guided calculator that shows the answer in both days and hours, with a plain-English explanation of how it was worked out.
The site includes calculators and guides for:
- Statutory & contractual annual leave — full-time, part-time and irregular-hours workers
- Pro-rata entitlement — for mid-year starters and leavers
- Bank holidays — dates and regional differences for 2025–2027, and how they interact with your allowance
- Specialist cases — NHS leave, shift workers, maternity, termination pay and rolled-up holiday pay
How we keep it accurate
Every calculator is built on official UK sources, and the methodology is stated openly on each page so you can check the working. Our primary references include:
- The GOV.UK holiday entitlement guidance and the official holiday entitlement calculator
- The Working Time Regulations 1998 (Reg 13 + Reg 13A = 5.6 weeks / 28 days statutory minimum)
- The Employment Rights (Amendment, Revocation and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2024, for the 12.07% accrual method for irregular-hours and part-year workers
- ACAS guidance on the average-day method and holiday pay
- Official bank-holiday dates from GOV.UK, mygov.scot and nidirect
Where rules changed recently — such as the 2024 changes for irregular-hours and part-year workers — we update the calculators and note the basis in each tool.
Privacy by design
The calculators run entirely in your browser. Your inputs — hours, dates, leave days — are never sent to our servers, and there are no accounts to create. You can read the full detail on our Privacy Policy page.
Who's behind it
Holiday Hours is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of GOV.UK, ACAS, HMRC, the NHS, or any government body — we simply build tools on top of their published, public guidance and link back to the original sources throughout.
Spotted something that looks wrong, or have a calculator you'd like to see? We genuinely want to hear it — please get in touch.