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How does LeaveWizard Calculate Holiday Entitlement

LeaveWizard provides an accurate holiday entitlement calculation based upon the number of working days an employee has within the year.

In the UK an Employee is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per year. This is known as the statutory leave entitlement or annual leave). An employer can include bank holidays as part of the statutory annual leave. You can find out more about holiday entitlements by going to https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights.

Annual Entitlement

The Annual Entitlement for an employee is based upon the full-time work pattern for the company, this is typically a 7 day week with 5 days working and 2 days for a weekend, however this can be changed depending on your company requirements.

The full-time work pattern is set on the "Administration | Work Patterns" page determined by the "Default" tag. You can change the work pattern that should be used as the default full-time work pattern by clicking the "Set as default" option next to the required work pattern.



Therefore, given a full-time working week is 5 days and a full-time employee should have annual entitlement of 28 days per year, the annual entitlement in weeks is as follows:

Annual entitlement weeks = 28 / 5 = 5.6 weeks per year

Calculating Current Year Allowance

When adding a new employee, if that employee starts mid-way through the current leave year, LeaveWizard will calculate the employee's remaining allowance for the current leave year for you. This is done on the employee details screen, under the Leave Year Dates and Allowances section:


If you change the employment start date, employment end date or allowance reset date then LeaveWizard will attempt to re-calculate the employee's allowance.


The Annual Allowance value is the total allowance that an employee is entitled to if they were to work a full leave year. The Annual Allowance value is used when determining the Current Year Allowance after either the employment start date, end date or allowance reset date changes.

The formula used for calculating holiday entitlement within LeaveWizard is as follows:


Current Year Allowance = (Annual Allowance / Total Number Of Weeks In Leave Year) * No Of Weeks Remaining In Leave Year

The result is then rounded up to the nearest 0.5 days 

So for example:

If an employee has an full year Annual Allowance of 28 days and starts work on 9th March, this is week 10 which means that the number of weeks remaining in the year is 42, therefore:

Current Year Allowance = (28 / 52) * 42 = 22.615 = 23 after rounding up

As another example, if the employee has a different Annual Allowance such as 33 days for the year, then the allowance would be calculated as follows:

Current Year Allowance = (33 / 52) * 42 = 26.61 = 27 after rounding up.

Including Public Holidays


Some companies configure allowance so that public holidays are included in an employees allowance and are automatically deducted from their allowance.

So for example, a full-time employee working a full year may have an Annual Allowance of 28 days that is inclusive of 8 days public holidays.

If an employee starts part-way through the year then LeaveWizard will initially deduct the 8 days public holiday which will leave 20 days regular entitlement. LeaveWizard will then determine how many days entitlement the employee should be entitled to. After making that calculation, we then determine how many public holidays are remaining within the leave year and then add those days onto the employee's allowance.

Given the leave starts on 1st January 2016
And a full-time employee has an Annual Allowance of 33 days
And there are 8 public holidays in the leave year with 2 public holidays days (Xmas Day and Boxing Day)
And a new employee starts on 19th September 2016

When LeaveWizard calculates the employees Current Year Allowance the following calculation will take place:

Annual Allowance (Excluding Public Holidays) = 33 - 8 = 25 days

Current Year Allowance = (25 / 52) * 15 = 7.21 => 7.5 after rounding up + 2 days public holiday = 9 days


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