With Easter being late this year, a potential anomaly has arisen for some employers whose holiday years run from April to March.
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Usually, there are eight bank holidays each holiday year in England and Wales. However, because Easter moves around within March and April, employers whose holiday year runs from April to March need to check each year how their employment / engagement contracts express staff’s holidays to ensure workers will receive their proper minimum entitlement.
Easter is late this year (Good Friday / Easter Monday are 18 and 20 April 2025 respectively) and so fall outside the 2024/2025 leave year. Easter 2024 bridged the end of March and beginning of April, with Good Friday felling on 31 March and Easter Monday on 01 April 2024. All of that means that between 01 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, only seven bank holidays will occur.
Statutory holiday entitlement in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales)
The Working Time Regulations 1998 (the Regulations) provide that a worker’s statutory minimum holiday entitlement is 5.6 weeks, or 28 days, for a full-time worker working five days per week, including bank holidays. This is split into four weeks “normal” holidays and 1.6 weeks / eight days, which represents public or bank holidays.
How this is implemented by employers and what that means for the holiday year 2024 / 2025
However, employers express this in various ways within their staff contracts, some common examples being:
- 28 days including bank holidays; or
- 20 days plus bank holidays; or
- 20 days plus 8 bank holidays
If employers’ contracts express their workers’ entitlement to holidays by separating bank holidays from the rest of their entitlement – as per examples two and three above - workers may have only been afforded 27 days for the leave year 2024/2025, which would breach the Regulations and, in the third example, also their contractual entitlement.
In those cases, to avoid a potential employment tribunal claim under the Regulations, employers may decide to provide affected workers an additional day’s holiday. Ideally, this would be before the end of the holiday year ie before 31 March 2025 but if the employer has not rectified the shortfall by that point, the worker is entitled to carry the leave over into the new holiday year.
Similar considerations will apply where additional contractual holiday entitlement is provided by an employer and so the same checks, as to how the entitlement is expressed in terms of bank holidays, should be made.
For further guidance on any aspects of bank holidays in the UK, please get in touch with our employment law solicitors.
