Annual leave for PT worker

[Mortimercat]

I have just (this week) started a new part time role. I work three days a week out of a standard five day week, office hours Monday to Friday. Fairly large company with a few thousand staff, so proper HR department.

My offer letter states 25 days annual leave, which I presume would be pro rated (although it doesn’t say that) and that it probably should say “plus bank holidays” but it doesn’t say that either.

Holiday year is the calendar year. Anyway I have gone into the system and noted it said I have 6.5 days of leave allowance until the end of the year. I cannot for the life of me figure out how they could come up with that. None of the remaining bank holidays this year fall on my working days, so I do not believe anything should be deducted from my allowance for bank holidays. Even if they were, it still doesn’t get to 6.5.

Does anybody, like me, think this is wrong?

Assuming leave year is Jan-Dec my thought is you would have 7.5 + bank holidays?? But I am not an expert of any sort.

What do you think it should be?

You need to work out how many bank holidays fall on your working and non working days as you'll be entitled to a proportion of the bank holidays only, so you may need to use a day's annual leave for a bank holiday day off.
Which days do you work?

Yes a quick calculation suggests it should be 7.5. Can't you just ask HR?

Yes as I mentioned, none of the remaining bank holidays this year are on days I would be working.

I will be asking HR next time I am in, I am trying to get my facts straight first. 🙂

When I use the government calculator I get 10. Now obviously that would include bank holidays which would need to be deducted, but as there are no bank holidays on my working days (Wed- Friday). I think I should get all 10, if not more because the allowance is more generous than statutory.

P/t leave is often worked out in hours, I had the equivalent of 30 days pro rata in hours, the same with bank Holidays. It actually worked well as I was term time only so never needed my bank Holidays & could add them on to annual leave.

At a very rough guess because don’t know how many hours classed as full time

full timer gets 25 7hour days =175 hours
PT 21 hours pro rata would be 102 hours

6.5 days based on 7 hour days would be 45 hours so that’s nearly 1/2 a yearly allowance

also if you don’t work the full holiday year some give u think it used to be day and 1/2 for each full month worked so that would be 9 hours a month 5 months 45 hours =6.5 days

some companies keep BH separate
you need to query it might be right but at least you’ll know how they have worked it out
all the above is just based on assumptions of FT and PT hours

If it's a big organisation then there should be a leave policy that will state how holidays are worked out for part time workers. Just have a chat with HR and get them to explain it to you - if there's a mistake it can be sorted, I don't think there's any need to go in ready for battle.

Did you start on a day other than Monday? That was the cause of my leave entitlement/lieu time being incorrect when I first started!

I am not going go to battle, I am going to as you say ask for an explanation. I just wanted to have a good understanding first, because at the moment this seems to be less than even a statutory minimum. I am baffled as to how they could arrive at 6.5, even if they forgot about bank holidays it wouldn’t be that.

No I did not start on a Monday, Monday is a non working day for me.

Do you know what full time staff get re: leave/bank holidays as the statutory minimum would be 28 days not 25. Do they get 25 days plus bank holidays maybe?

Minimum entitlement would be 5.6 weeks x 3 days = 16.8 days. As you're half way through the year I'd guess you have half of them which would be 8.4 days (more if full time staff get more than the minimum)

So our system assumes everyone works their hours equally over mon-Friday (even though I work for the nhs and there must be countless people who don't have that work pattern). My start date was a Tuesday and this was apparently enough to totally confuse the system 😂 just something to consider as a possible explanation if a chat with HR doesn't get to the bottom of it.

If full time staff get 25 + 8 = 33 days then they are getting 6.6 weeks holiday so for you 6.6 x 3 = 19.8 days. Half a years leave = 9.9 days.

I am certainly assuming it is 25 days plus bank holidays because as you say 25 days including bank holidays would be illegal.

Even if the company did allow the statutory minimum, my 6.5 days for just over half a year and 0.6 FTE is below that, and hence my complete bafflement.

I thought it would be 10 too.

Is there a chance you have to take off the 3 days between Christmas and New Year, so they've deducted those from the days you can book for yourself?

Oh that is a good point and not something I had considered. A forced shut down hasn’t been mentioned and it is a finance department, I have worked in finance departments for a long time and they are usually busy at the end of the year and I have never worked in one that closed down, but you never know. I will see if that is it.

I work 3 days a week and get a pro-rated leave allowance - 3/5ths of the full time allowance, where the full time allowance includes bank holidays.
I used to work Mon - Weds and had to use my leave allowance for BHs. Another colleague told me that if I changed to Tues - Thurs or Weds - Fri I wouldn't have to use up allowance on BHs, and in effect I would have an extra 6 days holiday per year ie another 2 weeks.
I am now working Tues - Thurs 😀

I also get it to 7.5 days of annual leave. I'd check about the 1 day discrepancy, and also how they will be giving you your BH entitlement. They mustnt be including BHs in your AL entitlement, some organisations will list those separately.

But as I mentioned, there are no bank holidays on my work days for the rest of the year. So my “bank holiday allowance” should be added to my normal allowance as I don’t need to use leave to cover bank holidays.

And that is what I think should have happened here but hasn’t. I would of course expect to use my leave to cover bank holidays if there were any falling on my working days but there aren’t for the rest of the year, Christmas BHs will be Monday and Tuesday this year. My working days are Wed-Fri.

We have a leave calculator at my work as its complicated when you factor in BH days (which all need entering whether you work those days or not, and it can actually benefit you don't forget!)

Also check the leave period as ours starts 1st October so they're not all 1st jan

That's a good suggestion to check. I've worked in places where they closed over Christmas including the office staff but I do know that the financial year was never the same as the calender year so no issue with having to be there for the end of the year.

The person calculating your AL maybe hasn't sat down and gone through the calendar to see what days the Christmas and New Year BHs fall on and whether you are working that day or not. So just calculated your AL as a %age of full time annual leave. I guess they may not understand how BH entitlement works for part time workers, you're obviously entitled to the time off for those too.

I'd ask for confirmation of your pro rata'd BH entitlement, and also about the missing AL day.

What are the earning rules for your leave year? When starting we earned 1/12 of our leave for each full calendar month worked. So a day or 2 could be lost if you don't start on the 1st (if they give more than the statutory minimum).