NHS annual leave calculator

The Agenda for Change leave scale

Every Agenda for Change contract builds annual leave on the same three-tier scale, set out in Section 13 of the NHS Terms and Conditions Handbook. The figure that changes as your reckonable service grows is the number of leave days — the public holidays sit on top, and how many of those you get depends on which of the four nations employs you.

The Handbook expresses each tier as "days plus public holidays" rather than a single combined figure — so the 27, 28, 29 and 33 above are leave days only, before a single public holiday is added. How many public holidays get added is the first place the four nations genuinely diverge, and it's covered nation by nation below.

How the four nations differ

Agenda for Change is a UK-wide agreement, but each nation's NHS employer negotiates its own variations on top of it. Three things vary: the leave-day tier itself, the number of public holidays added to it, and — in Scotland only — the length of the standard working week those days get converted against.

England

NHS England follows the base scale exactly as written: 27 days on appointment, 29 after five years' reckonable service, 33 after ten, plus 8 general public holidays added on top (Handbook para 13.3). The standard working week is 37.5 hours (para 10.1), and that figure is what every days-to-hours conversion in this guide is built from unless stated otherwise.

Wales

NHS Wales uses the same 29- and 33-day tiers after five and ten years, but its on-appointment figure is 28 days, not 27 — an extra day above the base scale that has applied since the 2021/22 leave year (Handbook para 13.1.1). It's a detail that gets missed surprisingly often — our own calculator now handles it correctly with a separate Wales option, but not every payroll system does, so it's worth double-checking your payslip. Wales adds the same 8 public holidays as England, on a 37.5-hour week.

Scotland

Scotland keeps the standard 27/29/33 tiers and the same 8 public holidays as England and Wales. NHS Scotland fixes four of them — 25 and 26 December and 1 and 2 January — and your health board sets the other four (NHS Circular PCS(AFC)2025/6, paras 28 to 30). So your public holidays are not the same list as Scotland's bank holidays. The bigger change is to the working week itself, and it isn't a single cut: it's arriving in two separate stages under NHS Circular PCS(AFC)2025/1. The standard week moved from 37.5 to 37 hours on 1 April 2024, and moved again, from 37 to 36 hours, on 1 April 2026. Because leave days convert to hours by multiplying against the standard week, both the interim 37-hour week and the eventual 36-hour week change the hourly value of the same day count — someone converting a Scottish AfC entitlement needs to know which of the three weekly figures (37.5, 37 or 36) applies to their leave year, not assume it's still 37.5.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland uses the standard 27/29/33 leave-day tiers on a 37.5-hour week, the same as England — but adds 10 public holidays, the most of any of the four nations (Handbook para 13.3). That's two more days than England, Wales and Scotland, purely from the public-holiday count rather than the underlying leave scale.

What counts as reckonable service

The tier you sit on — 27/28, 29 or 33 days — depends on reckonable service, not just time with your current employer. Reckonable service is continuous NHS employment: time spent with any NHS employer counts, not only your present trust or health board. If you leave the NHS and come back, your earlier NHS service still counts towards annual leave, however long the break (Handbook para 12.4). The 12-month break limit in para 12.5 is for sick pay, not annual leave. Your employer can also choose to count time with employers outside the NHS, in the UK or abroad, where it judges that work relevant to NHS employment (Handbook para 12.2). That is the employer's decision, not a right, so ask your trust's HR or payroll team. They hold your recorded reckonable-service date and can confirm which tier you've reached and when the next one starts.

Turning days into hours on a real rota

AfC entitlement is set in days, but very few NHS rotas run in whole days off against a fixed five-day week — three long days, a mix of 12-hour shifts, or a part-time pattern spread unevenly across the week are all common. The conversion that makes a day figure usable on any of those rotas is the same one used for pro-rata: work out what one day is worth in hours for the standard working week that applies to you (37.5 hours for England, Wales and Northern Ireland; 37.5, 37 or 36 in Scotland depending on the date), then multiply your day entitlement by that hourly value rather than by a fixed 7.5-hour assumption.

Concretely: a full-time AfC day is one-fifth of the standard week, because the scale assumes a five-day week as its reference point — 37.5 ÷ 5 = 7.5 hours for England, Wales and NI, or 37 ÷ 5 = 7.4 hours and, since 1 April 2026, 36 ÷ 5 = 7.2 hours in Scotland. For anyone not working a flat five-day week — part-time staff included — the more reliable method is to convert the whole year's entitlement into hours first (days × the relevant hourly day-length), then let the rota decide how those hours get booked off, rather than trying to force a day count onto shifts that don't divide evenly.

A worked example

Take a part-time band 5 nurse in England working 22.5 hours a week with 7 years' reckonable service — enough to sit on the 29-day tier, since that tier starts after 5 years.

• Full-time-equivalent entitlement: 29 leave days + 8 public holidays = 37 days at 37.5 hours a week.
• Her part-time fraction of a full-time week: 22.5 ÷ 37.5 = 0.6 exactly.
• Leave days: 29 × 0.6 = 17.4 days. The Handbook sets no rounding rule for these, so they stay at 17.4.
• Public holiday days: 8 × 0.6 = 4.8, which the Handbook rounds up to the nearest half day, so 5 days (para 13.6). Total: 17.4 + 5 = 22.4 days.
• Converting to hours: a full-time day here is worth 37.5 ÷ 5 = 7.5 hours, so 22.4 × 7.5 = 168 hours. This is the figure the calculator above gives for the same inputs.
• A plain 0.6 of the full-time 277.5 hours (37 days × 7.5) would be 166.5 hours. The extra 1.5 hours is the half-day round-up on the public holidays.

She can now book that 168 hours off in whatever pattern her rota uses — three 7.5-hour days a week, a run of 12-hour shifts, or anything else her rota coordinator agrees — because the entitlement was converted to hours before it met the rota, not forced into a day count that assumed a five-day working pattern she doesn't actually work.

Part-time, bank and mixed contracts

The 0.6 fraction in the example above — contracted hours divided by the full-time standard week — is the same fraction that applies to any part-time AfC contract, whatever the split of days and hours behind it. It's also the fraction used to pro-rata entitlement for staff who join or leave partway through a leave year, combined with the proportion of the year actually worked.

This page does not work out leave for bank work. How you get holiday for bank shifts depends on your bank contract, so check it with your bank office or HR team. If you have a substantive post as well, ask them how the two are treated.

For pay during leave, the Handbook sets the reference period for staff with irregular hours: since 6 April 2020 it is the last 52 weeks, and in finding 52 weeks of pay your employer can look back no more than 104 weeks from the date the leave begins (Handbook para 13.9).