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 2026–2028, and how they interact with your allowance
- Specialist cases — NHS leave, shift workers, maternity, termination pay and rolled-up holiday pay
Who's behind it
Holiday Hours is built and maintained by Leon Finnerty, an independent developer based in the UK. I'm not an employment lawyer or HR professional, so I don't give advice. Instead, every calculator and guide is checked against the primary sources (the Working Time Regulations 1998, GOV.UK and ACAS guidance) and links to them, so you can check the working yourself.
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 — the tools are simply built on top of their published, public guidance, with links back to the original sources throughout.
If you spot something wrong, or there's a calculator you'd like to see, email me at leon@holidayhours.co.uk or use the contact page, and I'll look into it.
How it's kept accurate
Every calculator is built on official UK sources, and the methodology is stated openly on each page so you can check the working. The primary references are:
- 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 2023, 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 — I update the calculators and note the basis in each tool. Every notable update, including corrections, is listed with its date on the What's changed page.
Privacy by design
The calculators run entirely in your browser. Your inputs — hours, dates, leave days — are never sent to any server, and there are no accounts to create. You can read the full detail on the Privacy policy page.