Calculate accrued annual leave on termination

The payment you're owed when you leave

When your employment ends — whether you resign, are dismissed, or are made redundant — you keep the right to be paid for any statutory holiday you've built up but not yet taken. It isn't something you have to negotiate: it's a payment in lieu set out in regulation 14 of the Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTR), and it applies whatever the reason your job is ending.

Reg 14 states the calculation in its own terms, and it's worth knowing them, because most explanations of "termination holiday pay" skip straight to a rough formula without saying where it comes from. The regulation sets your payment at (A × B) − C, where:

• A is your leave entitlement under reg 13 and reg 13A — the standard 5.6 weeks, expressed in the days or hours that match your working pattern.
• B is the proportion of your leave year that had expired on the date your employment ended.
• C is the leave you'd already taken in that same period.

The rest of this page works through A, B and C in turn, then puts them together with a real set of dates and a real wage, so you can check the number your employer gives you.

Working out the number

How much of the leave year you actually worked

This is B. Your leave year almost certainly doesn't run from your start date — most run on the calendar year or the company's financial year, so the first thing to pin down is when yours starts. Count the days from that start date to your last day of employment, inclusive, and divide by the total number of days in the leave year — 365, or 366 in a leap year. That fraction is how much of the year had "expired" by the time you left, and it's the proportion your entitlement gets scaled by.

What you've already taken

This is C. Add up the days of holiday you've actually used since the leave year began — not since you joined the company, if that's different, and not including any days you'd booked but that fell after your leaving date, since you won't be working (or accruing leave) that far into the year. Only holiday taken inside the current leave year counts here; anything carried over from an earlier year is handled separately, below.

Putting it together

This is A. It's your standard annual entitlement — the statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks, made up of 4 weeks under reg 13 plus a further 1.6 weeks under reg 13A — converted into the number of days that means for your working pattern. For a five-day week that's 28 days; for part-time or irregular patterns it's pro-rated, and your contract may promise more than the statutory floor. Multiply A by B to see what you'd accrued by your last day, then subtract C to get the balance still owed. If that comes out negative, see "If you've taken more leave than you'd built up" below.

A worked example

Marcus works full-time, five days a week, on a fixed salary of £31,200 a year — a fixed weekly wage of £600, or £120 a day. His employer's leave year runs 1 January to 31 December, and his standard entitlement is 28 days (the statutory 5.6 weeks for a five-day week). He resigns, and his last day is 15 July 2026.

• Days from 1 January to 15 July 2026 inclusive: 31 + 28 + 31 + 30 + 31 + 30 + 15 = 196 days. 2026 has 365 days, so B = 196 ÷ 365 = 0.5370 (about 53.7% of the year).
• By 15 July, Marcus has taken 10 days of his 2026 entitlement — that's C.
• A × B = 28 × (196 ÷ 365) = 15.0356 days accrued by his last day.
• (A × B) − C = 15.0356 − 10 = 5.0356 days owed (5.04 days rounded to two decimals).
• At his daily rate of £120, that's 5.0356 × £120 = £604.27 due in his final payslip, on top of his normal notice pay.

If you've taken more leave than you'd built up

Run the same sum with C larger than A × B — say Marcus had taken 20 days instead of 10 — and the result goes negative: 15.0356 − 20 = −4.9644 days, worth £595.73 at his daily rate. That means he's had more paid holiday than he'd actually accrued by his leaving date.

This is a genuine worry for people leaving a job, and the rule on it is narrower than a lot of employers assume. According to Acas, an employer can only deduct the overpaid amount from your final wages if two things are both true: you've genuinely taken more holiday than you built up, and the deduction was "agreed in the contract or in writing beforehand." If neither your contract nor any separate written agreement covers it, your employer taking the money back is not automatically lawful just because the arithmetic favours them.

Leave carried over from last year counts too

The (A × B) − C sum above only deals with the leave year you left in. But if you were also sitting on untaken leave carried forward from an earlier year — because sickness or another form of statutory leave prevented you taking it, for example — that doesn't just get forgotten on your last day. Since 1 January 2024, a new reg 14(6) — inserted by SI 2023/1426 — extends the payment-in-lieu right to cover untaken carried-forward leave from earlier years as well, not just the current one.

Back to Marcus: suppose he was also carrying 3 untaken days forward from 2025. Reg 14(6) means those 3 days get paid out alongside the 5.0356 days above, not left behind — taking his total owed to 8.0356 days, or £604.27 + (3 × £120 = £360.00) = £964.27.

Checking it against your payslip

When your final payslip arrives, you're checking for a few specific things: that a holiday-pay line appears at all, that the number of days it's based on matches your own (A × B) − C sum (plus any reg 14(6) carry-forward), and that the daily or hourly rate applied is your normal rate of pay, not a reduced one. On timing, Acas is explicit that "a worker should get their final pay on the date they are normally paid" — so if you're paid monthly and leave mid-month, the holiday balance should still land with the rest of your final pay on that month's normal payday, not on some other date your employer picks.

If the figure on your payslip doesn't match your own working, ask payroll which leave year, which start date and which entitlement figure they used — a mismatch is usually one of those three inputs, not a dispute about the formula itself.

Since 6 April 2026, employers must keep records of the annual leave you take and the holiday pay you get, and keep them for at least 6 years. If a figure doesn't match your own, you can ask your employer to show you how they worked it out.