There are more than 8.5 million people who work part-time in the UK.

If you have part-time workers, or are considering taking one on, then you need to ensure that you know exactly how much holiday they are entitled to - and this includes bank holidays.

This is a legal requirement, so it's important you get it right. To help you out, here’s all you need to know about bank holiday allowances for your part-time staff.

Read below for the detailed description of the formulas used or alternatively you can use the calculator on our website. Click here Sometimes it's nice to know how things work, if you are one of those people then read on.

Either way the process is the same, Calculate, create, assign.

For part-time employees, we would advise setting the statutory holiday setting for these users within Breathe to 'no' - doesn't receive statutory holidays. The reason for this is if you set part-time employees to 'yes' - they do receive statutory holidays, this will mean these employees could receive too much statutory holiday, as the system doesn't automatically pro-rata this amount for part-timers.

You can then reflect the holiday and statutory entitlement for your part-time employees manually, as detailed below in the next section.

You can assign holiday allowances via the users profile under More > work pattern and holiday allowance or if you have lots of users that are on the same allowance i.e 10 people working the same 3 day week you can assign in bulk, click the button below to find out how.

For all employees, minimum statutory holiday entitlement is calculated by multiplying the number of days worked per week by a factor of 5.6. The result – which is capped at 28 days – is the number of days of annual leave that the worker is statutorily entitled to receive. 

You don't have to give bank holidays as paid leave, but many companies do choose to include them as part of the annual leave entitlement. 

For part-time annual leave, the same 5.6 factor is used.

Let's look at an example - if an employee is working two days per week, they'd be entitled to 11.2 days’ holiday. Or, if they work three days per week, they'd receive 16.8 days. Of course, part of a day is difficult to take as holiday, so part-days are generally rounded up to keep things simple.
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Most of the UK’s bank holidays fall on a Monday or Friday. In companies that give paid bank holidays, and where part-time employees don’t usually work on these days, those part-time employees would end up receiving proportionately fewer days’ leave than their full-time colleagues.

To prevent this inequality, many companies give their part-time employees a pro-rated bank holiday allowance. This is calculated based on the number of hours worked, regardless of the days that are worked and irrespective of whether or not they would be bank holidays. 

Let’s take an example of a company where the full-time employees get 8 bank holidays. There are usually 8 bank holidays per year in England and Wales, and these are taken as paid leave either on top of or part of their normal allowance.

These employees work five days a week, equalling a total of 40 hours, so are effectively receiving 64 hours of bank holiday leave (8 bank holidays x 8 hour working day = 64 hours).

Here's how you figure out entitlement for a part-time employee:

If an employee works two days a week, the company would give 25.6 hours of bank holiday leave.

16 hours worked per week / 40 hours maximum working time per week x 64 hours of bank holiday leave. 

(number of hours worked per week / number of hours in a full-time week) x (number of bank holidays x hours per working day)

You simply round it up. In the example above, the 25.6 hours would be rounded up to 26 hours, which for an eight hour day is three and a quarter days. 

If the part-time worker is due to work on a bank holiday, then they would need to book it as holiday as normal and it would come out of their total holiday entitlement.

And that's it - you have everything you need to calculate bank holiday entitlement for your part time workers.

Remember you will need to create the correct allowance for your part time people. Breathe doesn't pro rata leave based on the working pattern assigned.

Also if they have just joined you will need to assign the full yearly allowance, Breathe will do the rest and adjust this for the first year of employment.

If you have people that work the same part time hours/days then no. example 7 people all work Monday, Wednesday and Friday, they will all have the same holiday entitlement so can be linked to the same allowance, You couldn't however have someone that works 2 days a week assigned to this allowance as they would be due a smaller amount of leave