The formula
How to calculate holiday pay
Holiday pay must reflect normal earnings, not just basic pay. Since the Supreme Court decisions of the last decade, regular overtime, commission and shift premiums all have to be included in the average.
The reference period is 52 weeks for workers with irregular hours, ignoring any week in which no pay was received and going back up to 104 weeks to find 52 paid ones.
Fill in the following:
- Average weekly pay — over the last 52 paid weeks, ignoring unpaid ones
- Days worked per week (days)
- Days of holiday being taken (days)
- Months into the holiday year (months)
Results appear immediately — there is nothing to submit. Changing a field rewrites the link, so you can share the exact scenario you are looking at.
The order the fields are filled in makes no difference to the result — the calculator recomputes the whole formula from whatever is currently in every field, not step by step. That means it is safe to adjust one number, watch the result change, and adjust it back, without worrying about resetting anything first.
Why holiday pay matters
Most people who look up a holiday pay calculation already have a specific number in mind — a quote, an offer, a target — and want to check it rather than learn the theory behind it. This page is built for that: enter your own figures, see the result immediately, and change any field to see how the answer moves without redoing the arithmetic from scratch each time.
This tends to come up when comparing two concrete alternatives — two lenders, two savings products, two ways of structuring the same decision — rather than in the abstract. Run both scenarios through the same calculator with the same assumptions and the comparison becomes fair, because the only thing changing between the two results is the number you are actually trying to test.
The reason a page like this exists at all, rather than leaving the calculation to a spreadsheet or a textbook appendix, is that the formula behind holiday pay is fiddly enough to get wrong by hand but not complicated enough to need specialist software. That middle ground — real enough maths to matter, simple enough to check instantly — is exactly what a dedicated calculator is for, and it is why the same figure recalculated here should match a careful manual calculation almost exactly.
A calculator like this one is often bookmarked and returned to repeatedly over months rather than used once, particularly for anything tied to an ongoing plan such as a mortgage, a savings goal or an investment being tracked. Because the figures live in the web address rather than only in memory, coming back to the same page with updated numbers is quicker than starting from a blank spreadsheet each time.
Worked example
Take the figures the calculator starts with:
- Average weekly pay: 620
- Days worked per week: 5 days
- Days of holiday being taken: 5 days
- Months into the holiday year: 7 months
That gives:
- Pay for the days taken: 620
- Annual entitlement: 28 days
- Accrued so far: 16.33 days
These figures are only the calculator's own starting values, included so the working is visible rather than hidden inside the tool above. Replace them with your own numbers and the same arithmetic applies — nothing about the method changes, only the inputs feeding it.
Reading the result
Statutory entitlement is 5.6 weeks, which is 28 days for someone working five days a week. Bank holidays may be included within that or given on top, depending on the contract.
Where this goes wrong. Rolled-up holiday pay — adding a percentage to each payslip instead of paying when leave is taken — was unlawful for years. It is permitted again from April 2024, but only for irregular-hours and part-year workers.
A useful check on any unfamiliar result is to compare it against a rough mental estimate first — round the inputs to convenient numbers and see whether the calculator's answer lands in roughly the same territory. A wildly different figure usually means one of the fields was entered in the wrong unit, most often a percentage typed as a whole number where a decimal was expected, or the reverse.
5.6 weeks a year, capped at 28 days for full-time workers. Part-time entitlement is the same 5.6 weeks counted in their own working days.
Regular overtime does, along with commission and shift allowances. Genuinely occasional, voluntary overtime that is not part of normal working may be excluded.
The answer it gives you is pay for the days taken. With 620 average weekly pay, 5 days days worked per week and 5 days days of holiday being taken, that comes to 620. Change any field and the figure moves with it.
Whenever one of the underlying figures changes — a new interest rate, a different balance, an updated term — since the result only reflects what is currently in the fields. There is no need to keep a separate record of past results; the web address for a filled-in version already carries the figures used to produce it.
Not unless a tax rate or a fee is explicitly one of the inputs above. Where it is not, the figure shown is a gross calculation, and any tax due depends on your personal circumstances and current tax rules, which are worth checking separately.
The arithmetic itself is exact — the calculator applies the formula shown above precisely, with no rounding until the final figure is displayed. The uncertainty, where it exists, is entirely in the inputs: an estimated rate or an approximate balance carries that same approximation through to the result.