Calculating bank holidays

[KatyMac]

I am an employer

I give my team 5 weeks holiday plus 6 bank holidays (we are already on a weeks holiday over Christmas). My team work different days & hours.

We have tried several versions of calculating bank holidays & none of them make sense to me.

First version: I took off 1/5th of a week leave for each bank holiday whether worked or not (leaving everyone with 6 weeks holiday) and paid the balance of their working day myself (eg work 6 hours of an 18 hour week on a Monday so that week work 12+3.6 (BH Monday) but get paid for 18)

Second version: I took off 1/5th of a week leave for each bank holiday worked and the other part of the day was taken out of their leave (eg work 6 hours of an 18 hour week on a Monday so that week work 12+3.6(BH)+2.4(Annual Leave) & get paid for 18)

Third version: I took off 1/5th of a week leave for each bank holiday worked and the other part of the day was taken out of their leave (eg work 6 hours of an 18 hour week on a Monday so that week work 12+3.6(BH)+2.4(time worked another day that week) & get paid for 18)

But I'm now really confused & don't know if any of them are right....help?

So you give 25days (including ?2 bank holidays at Christmas) and then another 6 days so total paid holiday for full time worker is 31 days.
If full time workers work 40 hours over 5 days they are entitled to 248 hours holiday or 6.20hours holiday per hour worked each week. So if you work 25 hours per week that is 155 hours holiday per year or 19.38 days if it is an 8 hour though you should round up holiday so if you allow half days 19.5 if you don't allow half days 20 days.

You're making it too complicated Katy. Use totals.

FT worker gets 26 days. If you need hours then work out how many hours that is.

Then work out each team member's total pro rata entitlement, in days of hours whichever works for you.

Any bank holidays they take off get deducted from the total.

Oh, and I would suggest adding the Christmas week into that in the same way, as Christmas falls differently every year.

As Flowery said.
Where I work, you add together the AL and the BH to form the total for a full timer, then part timers get pro rata of that. You are not allowed to work on a BH, so if you are PT then it's best to not work on a Monday as you have to take all those BHs, and end up using some of your AL, whereas if you don't work Mondays you are off anyway, but still have the % of them added to your AL.

The easiest way is to calculate everybody's holidays in hours.
Full timer would get 31 days (5 weeks + 6 bank holidays) based on 5 day week =6.2 weeks x 37 hours (full time hours) = 229.5 hours per year

Part timer (on 20 hours say) gets 6.2 weeks x 20 hours = 124 hours per year.

Every time there is a bank holiday the number of hours that person would have worked on that day is deducted from their total annual leave for the year so if they are not contracted to work on the bank holiday day they lose no annual leave!

This also works well with employees who work different length days during the week because if they take a day off they lose the number of hours worked that day - stops employees gaining extra holiday hours by always taking off their longest working days.

So a person who works Mondays (like in my example) gets 111.6 hours and loses 36 hours to Monday bank holidays & one that doesn't work Mondays doesn't

Is that fair?

What is fair? the unanswerable question. It means everyone gets exactly the same number of paid holiday hours regardless of the days they work.
Did have a case of someone who was contracted to work a long Monday and thus used a lot of annual leave hours for bank holidays but gave her the option of working some hours back during the rest of the week. If not the other employees would say that she gets a lot of extra annual leave hours!

The other flip of fair is:
That you give every one pro-rata holiday plus bank holidays paid. Is that then fair to the full time person that the part time person gets effective more paid holiday.
I mitigate this for my part time staff by offering them choices Paid holiday, unpaid holiday or work a different day that week. I have one member of staff who only works Mondays to save his paid holiday and keep his pay even he works a Tuesday after every bank holiday. It's great for me that he does because usually the day after a bank holiday is really busy.
First rule of employing staff is that not matter how hard you try you will never please everyone you must just try to have an even hand.

The fairest thing is to make sure everyone gets the same amount of paid time off as everyone else, obviously pro rata for part timers.

Yes that means some people will have to use up more of their time for bank holidays than others, but that's still more fair and easier to calculate than any other way.

Focus on same amount of paid time off, and be less worried about bank holiday as such.