Annual leave calculator

Why pro-rata holiday trips people up

Annual leave looks simple until someone works an unusual pattern. A full-time employee on a five-day week gets a tidy number, but the moment hours drop to three or four days, or a person joins partway through the year, the "obvious" arithmetic produces the wrong answer. The most common mistake is to take the headline figure, such as the UK statutory 28 days, and scale it by the ratio of part-time to full-time days. That works by coincidence at the cap, but it breaks the legal logic and goes wrong as soon as a contract gives more than the minimum. The correct method, used by this calculator, is to express the entitlement in weeks first, then multiply by the number of days the person actually works each week. Five point six weeks for a three-day-a-week worker is 16.8 days, full stop, and that holds whether the contract is at the floor or well above it.

Statutory minimum versus your contract

Every figure the law sets is a floor, not a ceiling. UK employers very often pay 25 days of leave plus the eight bank holidays, which is comfortably above the 5.6-week minimum, and many continental contracts and collective agreements push past the statutory base too. That is why the tool offers a contractual basis: enter your own full-time allowance, and it pro-rates that number with the same weeks-based method. The statutory basis is there so you can sanity-check that your employer is at least meeting the legal minimum. If the pro-rated statutory figure comes out higher than what you have been offered, that is a conversation worth having with HR.

Bank holidays: included or on top?

This is the single biggest source of confusion in leave maths, and it splits along national lines. In the United Kingdom there is no separate statutory right to take bank holidays off, so the 5.6-week minimum can legally absorb them. A contract phrased as "28 days inclusive of bank holidays" is meeting the floor, while "20 days plus bank holidays" is more generous because it stacks roughly eight public holidays on top of the paid leave. Across most of the European Union the model flips: the statutory annual leave is granted in addition to public holidays, which are governed by separate national law. The calculator labels each jurisdiction so you know which way the public holidays fall before you compare two offers.

Counting in days, ouvrables, or ouvrés

Some countries count leave in ways that look unfamiliar from a UK or US desk. France grants 2.5 jours ouvrables of leave per month worked, which is 30 working days on a six-day reference week, equivalent to 25 jours ouvrés on a five-day week. Germany's federal minimum is written as 24 days on a six-day week, which becomes 20 on a standard five-day week. The tool normalises everything to a five-day-week day count so you can compare like with like, then shows the equivalent in hours assuming an eight-hour day for anyone who tracks leave in hours rather than days.

Where this fits with your other work tools

Annual leave is one piece of the working-time picture. Once you know your entitlement, the working days calculator helps you plan which dates to book around weekends and public holidays, the holiday pay calculator covers what you should be paid for the days you work, and the tax year calculator tracks the deadlines that bracket your leave year. Together they cover entitlement, pay, and timing without you having to leave the site.

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