Holiday pay is one of those subjects that only becomes urgent at the worst moment - the leaver’s final payslip, the agency worker’s grievance, the seasonal driver’s tribunal claim. The statutory framework is shorter than the arguments suggest: 5.6 weeks, for almost everyone, with accrual rules for the irregular workforce transport runs on.
Almost all people classed as workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday a year - the statutory leave entitlement. For someone working a 5-day week that is 28 days’ paid annual leave. And the “almost all” list reaches the workforce fleets actually employ: agency workers, workers with irregular hours (where the hours in a pay period often or always change), and part-year workers (who have periods of at least a week in a leave year with no work and no pay). The seasonal driver and the agency picker are inside the entitlement, not adjacent to it.
Part-time workers on regular hours get 5.6 weeks too, expressed in their own working pattern: three days a week means 16.8 days (3 x 5.6). The week’s the constant; the days follow the pattern. There is a calculator for the fiddly cases, and it is worth using rather than improvising.
For irregular-hours and part-year workers, entitlement is up to 5.6 weeks and builds up - accrues - based on the hours they have actually worked, rather than arriving as a fixed number of days. One date matters: for leave years beginning on or before 31 March 2024, the accrual approach did not apply and entitlement could be estimated on average days or hours per week; leave years after that use accrual. Payroll systems that were set up before the change deserve a second look.
Statutory paid holiday is limited to 28 days: someone working six days a week is still entitled to 28 days, not 33.6. Bank holidays carry no independent right - they do not have to be given as paid leave at all - but an employer can choose to count them within the 5.6 weeks. Whether your “28 days plus bank holidays” offer is 28 or 36 in practice is a drafting detail that employees notice exactly once: when they calculate what they are owed.
Holiday entitlement is stickier than attendance: workers build it up during maternity, paternity and adoption leave, and while off sick. They can also request holiday at the same time as sick leave. And extra-contractual leave - anything above the statutory minimum - plays by the employer’s own rules; an employer can require qualifying service before extra leave kicks in, because the statutory machinery only governs the statutory part.
The transport leave calendar fights itself: peak season - November, December, Easter - is exactly when operators most want to restrict leave and when workers most want it. The law permits managing when leave is taken; it does not permit the entitlement quietly expiring in the crush. Part-year and irregular drivers hired for peak accrue from the hours they work, which means the “six-week Christmas temp” is building holiday with every shift - a cost and an administration that should be priced into seasonal hiring rather than discovered at the final payslip.
Paid annual leave is a legal right the employer must provide, and disputes over it follow the employment dispute route. The transport-specific failure modes: rolled-up arrangements that never surfaced the entitlement, agency workers whose holiday vanished between agency and hirer, irregular drivers whose accrual was never tracked because “the hours vary too much”. All three are payroll problems before they are legal ones, and all three are cheaper fixed at payroll. And the calculation question underneath - what a “week’s pay” is for a driver with variable hours, overtime and premiums - is where the remaining disputes actually live; get the entitlement right, then get the rate right, and keep the working for both.
One detail that catches fleets out: an employer can count bank holidays towards the 5.6-week statutory minimum, as long as the contract says so. A driver on a five-day week with “28 days plus bank holidays” has a better deal than the floor; “28 days including bank holidays” meets it exactly. Check which version your contracts actually promise before quoting the numbers.