Free tool
Work out pro-rata paid holiday for part-time and part-year staff. Pick a country, set how many days a week you work and how much of the leave year you cover, and the tool shows the entitlement step by step under UK, Irish, German, French, and EU rules.
5 = a standard full week.
Used on the contractual basis (or where there is no statutory minimum).
12 = a full year; lower for new starters.
Every step shows the formula used. Edit any input above to update.
Your annual leave
28days
Pro-rated for 5 days a week.
Equivalent in hours
224hours
Assuming an 8-hour working day.
5.6 weeks of paid leave, capped at 28 days for a 5-day-or-more week. Bank holidays can be counted toward this minimum, there is no separate statutory right to take bank holidays off. Many contracts give 28 days plus bank holidays, but that is contractual, not statutory.
Sources
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take the full-time entitlement in weeks and multiply by the number of days the part-timer works each week. In the UK that is 5.6 weeks, so someone working three days a week gets 5.6 × 3 = 16.8 days. Working in weeks rather than scaling the capped 28-day figure avoids rounding errors.
It depends on the country. In the UK the 5.6-week statutory minimum can include bank holidays, so a contract that gives '20 days plus bank holidays' is being more generous than the floor. In most of the EU the statutory leave is on top of public holidays, which are a separate entitlement.
UK law guarantees 5.6 weeks (28 days for a five-day worker, capped). The EU Working Time Directive sets a floor of 4 weeks (20 days). Ireland gives 4 weeks plus public holidays, Germany a federal minimum of 20 days plus public holidays, and France 5 weeks plus public holidays.
Scale the annual entitlement by the fraction of the leave year you will work. If you join with six months left, you accrue roughly half the year's allowance. Many employers accrue leave monthly and round up part-days in the worker's favour.