The holiday period is a time of joy…and sometimes dread.
As the summer holidays are upon us, we thought it would be worth sharing a few holiday request scenarios with you; including notice requirements, holiday accrual for new starters, and holiday pay for terminations.
Holidays are fun and exciting, but holiday entitlement can be a bit more complicated. It is a time when you either give yourself a pat on the back for your awesome contracts of employment or curse your past self for not getting around to it!
Scenario 1)
An employee asks you for holiday leave after 2 months of starting their new role. Their holiday entitlement is 28 days.
What do you do?
Most employers use an accrual system which is in place for the first year of employment. This means that holiday days are accrued monthly in advance, equalling one-twelfth of the annual holiday entitlement.
Therefore this employee will have a rounded up amount of 5 holidays accrued.
Scenario 2)
An employee wants to take 10 days holiday from the 12th of August.
Unless otherwise stated in your contract of employment, then you go by the Working Time Regulations, that state an employee must give you 20 days’ notice to take any leave. Therefore they must have applied for this leave by no later than the 14th of July.
What do you do?
If they have given the required 20 days’ notice, you can refuse their request as long as it is at least 10 days before the first date of their leave, so by the 28th of July.
Scenario 3)
You have an employee who has handed in his notice three months into the holiday year. Their salary is £20,800 and they are entitled to 28 days annual leave. He has only taken 1 day so far.
What do you do?
In this instance, under the Working Times Regulations, an employee who loses entitlement to annual leave because the termination is taking place during a leave year, has a right to a payment in lieu of the untaken holiday.
Unless you have a provision in your contract of employment that states otherwise, the payment in lieu of the leave is calculated by a statutory formula. In this particular example, the payment would equate to £537.93 for the accrued leave.