May is a great time of the year to assess your staff’s annual leave allowances. For those employees who have yet to book their leave, it allows you both enough time to spread out their left-over days before the end of the year.
When it comes to managing staff, tracking their annual leave can be stressful, especially when it comes to the intricacies of each individual staff member. Every employee will be entitled to ‘X’ number of days annual leave, as stated in their contract. The statutory minimum entitlement is 5.6 weeks (including bank holidays), which works out to 20 days paid leave plus the usual 8 UK bank holidays for employees who work a 5-day week.
The problem is that not all employees work a simple 5-day week. Some staff may work part time, or flexible hours, which can get quite confusing when bank holidays primarily fall on a Monday. It’s important to keep in mind any employees who don’t typically work on a Monday, or on the other hand, one’s who always do.
The process can be made a lot easier for you by converting the allocated days off into hours. This will make it much more straightforward to input and track on a spreadsheet for each employee. This enables both the manager and the employee to clearly see how much annual leave they have remaining.
It’s important to consider other factors, such as a necessary shut-down period over the Christmas, if employees are required to use annual leave on these dates. If this applies to you, make sure this is clearly added to your spreadsheet at the start of the year and the necessary leave allocation deducted. The final column should show the running total of the number of remaining hours that specific employee has.
Remember to convert the fractions of hours into decimals to make the calculations easier. (i.e. 15 mins = 0.25 hours, 30 mins = 0.5 hours, 45 minutes = 0.75 hours).
Subscribe to the Cygnul newsletter to download your own copy of our annual leave tracker spreadsheet, which is preformatted to work the calculations out for you.
| Formula: Pro-rata annual leave entitlement = PT weekly hours/5 (working days per week) x FTE annual leave entitlement (in days) Pro-rata bank holiday leave = FTE bank holiday entitlement (days) x FTE working hours per day x (PT weekly hours/FTE weekly hours) |
| Example One – Employee works 22.5 hours over 3 equal days (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) Pro-rata annual leave entitlement = 22.5 weekly hours x 4 weeks annual leave entitlement = 90 hours annual leave. FTE bank holiday entitlement = 8 bank holidays x 7.5 hours per day = 60 hours. Pro-rata bank holiday leave = FTE bank holiday entitlement (60 hours) x (22.5 weekly hours/37.5 FTE weekly hours) = 60 x 0.6 = 36 hours of bank holiday leave. |
| Example Two – Employee works 17.5 hours over 3 unequal days (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) Pro-rata annual leave entitlement = 17.5 weekly hours x 4 weeks annual leave entitlement = 70 hours annual leave. FTE bank holiday entitlement = 8 bank holidays x 7.5 hours per day = 60 hours. Pro-rata bank holiday leave = FTE bank holiday entitlement (60 hours) x (17.5 weekly hours/37.5 FTE weekly hours) = 60 x 0.4667 = 28 hours of bank holiday leave (rounded up). You can see the allowances for annual leave and bank holidays in the grey ‘allocation’ column. You can also see the bank holiday leave deductions in the blue ‘Bank Holiday (hours)’ column. Note that the employee does not work Thursdays so there is no deduction for 26th December 2024, as it falls on a Thursday this year. |
Remaining 2024 Bank Holidays
Monday 27th May – Spring Bank Holiday
Monday 26th August – Summer Bank Holiday
Wednesday 25th December – Christmas Day
Thursday 26th December – Boxing Day