Do bank holidays count towards your holiday entitlement?

This is the question we are asked more than any other, and the honest answer
is the one almost nobody expects.

What the law actually gives you

Almost every worker in the UK is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid
holiday a year, capped at 28 days. That is the whole of the statutory
entitlement. There is no separate legal right to bank holidays sitting on top of
it.

GOV.UK puts it plainly: bank or public holidays “do not have to be given as
paid leave”, and an employer “can choose to include bank holidays as part of a
worker’s statutory annual leave”.

So a full-time employee on five days a week gets 28 days. Whether that is “20
days plus bank holidays” or “28 days including bank holidays” is a decision your
employer makes, and it is written in your contract.

Why the difference matters so much

England and Wales normally have eight bank holidays a year. So the two common
arrangements look like this:

The first two lines describe the legal minimum. The third is an employer being
more generous than the law requires — which many are, and which is a real
part of what an offer is worth.

When you are comparing two job offers, this is worth more attention than it
usually gets. “25 days plus bank holidays” and “25 days including bank holidays”
are eight days apart. That is a week and a half of your life.

Part-time workers and the bank holiday problem

Here is where it gets genuinely unfair if it is handled badly.

Bank holidays cluster on Mondays. If you work Mondays and Tuesdays, you lose
far more of your entitlement to bank holidays than a colleague who works
Wednesdays and Thursdays — even though you both work two days a week.

The usual fix is to pro-rate bank holidays across everyone regardless of which
days they work: your entitlement is calculated in hours or days, bank holidays
come out of it if you would have worked them, and the balance is yours to
choose. If your employer does not do something like this, it is worth raising,
because the alternative treats part-time staff worse for no reason other than
which day of the week they happen to work.

Our holiday entitlement
calculator works out the 5.6 weeks for your own pattern, so you can see the
total you should be starting from before any bank holiday arithmetic.

Can you be made to take a bank holiday as leave?

Yes. If the workplace closes on bank holidays and your contract counts them as
part of your entitlement, those days are simply allocated for you. Many employers
do the same for the days between Christmas and New Year.

The reverse is also true: if your contract does not give bank holidays as
leave, you can be required to work them, and there is no automatic right to extra
pay for doing so. Time-and-a-half on a bank holiday is a contractual perk, not a
legal entitlement.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The number of bank holidays differs — Northern Ireland has ten, Scotland
has its own list and in practice many Scottish employers use local holidays
instead. None of this changes the 5.6 weeks, which is the same across the UK. It
only changes which days are likely to be spoken for.

What to do with this

Open your contract and find the holiday clause. You are looking for one word:
including or plus. Then check the leave year it runs on —
many start in January, plenty start in April, and some start on your own
anniversary, which changes when unused days expire.

If the clause is ambiguous, ask HR to confirm in writing which it is. It is a
reasonable question, and the answer is worth eight days.