Balancing your bank holidays

As practice managers begin to tackle holiday requests for the year ahead, Practice Index shares advice on how bank holidays impact the amount of leave staff can take

For many of us, we’ve returned to a new annual leave year and a spate of holiday requests for the months ahead. Working in primary care, it’s highly likely that your team members will work different hours over varying days where some will be part-time, and you will be faced with the challenge of ensuring that the annual leave allocations are all correct and legal.

If you’re worried about your staff saying, ‘I should have more leave than this; are you sure it’s right?’ or ‘I think I’m due more time off on bank holidays’, you can remove the worry, and the guesswork, by using Holiday Manager. 

Bank holidays can cause huge headaches when you’re calculating annual leave. Some people claim that ‘if a bank holiday falls on the day you work, you just get the day off’, but that’s not legally accurate. It seems obvious that if you work fewer hours per week, you get fewer hours of holiday, but how many of us would apply the same logic to bank holidays?

An example

Martha works Monday and Tuesday, 7.5 hours each day. John works Wednesday and Thursday, 7.5 hours each day. Both work a total of 15 hours a week and are entitled to five weeks of annual leave plus bank holidays. Both Martha and John are entitled to 75 hours of annual leave per year.

Muhammad works 37.5 hours a week, 7.5 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and has the same five weeks of annual leave. Muhammad is entitled to 187.5 hours of annual leave. But what happens when we include bank holidays in the picture.

In 2022, we’ve had ten bank holidays (six Mondays, one Tuesday, one Thursday, and one Friday). In this case, Martha would have the benefit of seven bank holidays, John would have the benefit of one, and Muhammad would benefit from all ten. Martha would receive seven times 7.5 hours of additional leave, which is 52.5 hours, John would receive 7.5 hours, and Muhammad would receive 75 hours.

To compare the relative amounts of time, Martha receives three hours of bank holiday for each of the 15 hours she works. Muhammad receives two hours for each of the 37.5 hours he works, while John only accrues half an hour for each of the 15 hours he works.

What would be a fair way to calculate bank holiday entitlement to ensure that all staff receive the same amount of paid time off, proportionate to the number of hours they work?

If we calculate entitlement on a pro rata basis according to the number of hours an individual works in a week, and then deduct these in line with the number of hours they would normally work on a given day when a bank holiday falls, this should be a fairer method. In this case, both Martha and John would have 30 hours of paid bank holiday entitlement, while Muhammad would still receive his 75 hours. This means that each will receive two hours of bank holiday entitlement for their working hours.

To take the bank holidays off as paid leave, Martha will need to use seven times 7.5 hours of leave, so she’ll need to top up her bank holiday entitlement using annual leave. Both John and Muhammad will have enough bank holiday entitlement to cover the bank holidays they were due to work, and in John’s case, he will have some additional entitlement left over to use at a time of his choosing or the practice might tell him when he can use the additional leave.

What would happen if Martha worked 10 hours on Monday and five hours on Tuesday?

For the six Monday Bank holidays, Martha would need to use 60 hours of Bank Holiday entitlement, and she’d also need to use five hours for the Tuesday Bank Holiday. As Martha only receives 30 hours of Bank Holiday entitlement, she will need to ‘top-up’ her entitlement with 35 hours of her annual leave so that she can take all the bank holidays off.  Martha, John and Muhammad all still receive the same amount of paid time off per contracted hour.

The law says that employees are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks of annual leave per year and that employers can include bank holidays as part of statutory annual leave. Bank holiday entitlement is just annual leave; the difference is that we’re told when we can take it.