HOLIDAY: HOW IT BUILDS UP, HOW IT IS PAID, HOW TO BOOK IT
Given to every temporary worker · Working Time Regulations 1998; Employment Rights Act 1996 sections 221 to 224
Given to every temporary worker, and published here before anybody signs anything. It sits alongside your terms of engagement, and where the two disagree the signed terms win and we want to be told.
1. How much you get
1.1 5.6 weeks a year, which is the statutory minimum and which we do not go below. You start building it up on your first day, not after a qualifying period.
1.2 If your hours are irregular, which for agency work they usually are, it builds up at 12.07 per cent of the hours you actually work in each pay period. That figure is 5.6 weeks written as a percentage; it is not a number we chose.
1.3 The holiday year runs from 1 January to 31 December.
2. What a day of holiday is worth, and the mistake to watch for
2.1 Holiday pay has to reflect what you normally earn. Both parts of that matter: the rate AND the hours.
2.2 So we work it out from your own average over the last 52 paid weeks, ignoring weeks in which you were paid nothing and looking back further to make up the 52 if we have to. The hours in that average are the hours you actually worked, not a figure somebody picked.
2.3 THIS IS WHERE AGENCY DRIVERS LOSE MONEY. It is common to see holiday paid as a flat eight hours a day. If you drive twelve hour shifts, eight hours is two thirds of a day's pay, and a fortnight off is worth a third less than the fortnight you worked. A fixed daily figure that is lower than your normal day is not holiday pay reflecting normal remuneration, whatever it is called.
2.4 If you ever think a holiday payment is short, ask, and we will show you the 52 week calculation with the weeks in it. It is your figure and you are entitled to see how it was made.
2.5 REGULAR OVERTIME COUNTS, and this is the one most forms get wrong. We have read an agency holiday form that says holiday pay is worked out on "rates paid during a client's normal working hours, that is, those which do not attract overtime rates". That is not the law. Since 1 January 2024 the Working Time Regulations define normal remuneration for the first four weeks of leave to include payments intrinsically linked to the work, and overtime regularly paid over the previous 52 weeks is inside that. If you work overtime most weeks, it is part of what a week off is worth.
2.6 The honest complication, because you will not hear it from everybody. Your 5.6 weeks is two entitlements bolted together: four weeks under regulation 13, which carry the fuller definition above, and a further 1.6 weeks under regulation 13A, which is a week's pay under sections 221 to 224 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and which an employer may lawfully pay at the basic rate. We tell you that rather than let you discover it on the last payslip of the year. We use the fuller calculation for all of it, because running two different sums on one person's leave is how mistakes get made, and because the difference is small and the argument is not.
3. Knowing your balance
3.1 Your balance is available to you without ringing anybody, in hours as well as days, showing what you have built up, what you have taken and what is left. If you would rather ask a person, ask, and you get an answer the same day.
3.2 We publish it in hours because hours are what you build up. A balance quoted only in days assumes everybody's day is the same length, and on driving work no two are.
3.3 A great many agency workers have never been told their balance at all. Asking for it is not a nuisance and it will never affect what work you are offered.
4. Booking it
4.1 Tell us the dates. We need seven days' notice where we can have it, and we will always try where we cannot. That is longer than the statutory minimum, and it is so we can tell a client in time rather than leave them a gap on the morning.
4.2 We will not unreasonably refuse. Where a client cannot release you for particular dates we will say so and say why, and we will try to find dates that work.
4.3 If you end up working a day you had booked as holiday, the holiday goes back to your balance. It is not lost.
4.4 Do not leave it all until December. That is advice rather than a rule, and the reason is that everybody else does the same thing.
5. Carrying it over
5.1 The honest position, which is more generous than the usual one line: most holiday should be taken in the year it builds up, and there are real circumstances in which it carries over anyway.
5.2 It carries over if you could not take it because you were off sick, or on maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental or parental leave. Sickness carry over runs for eighteen months from the end of that leave year.
5.3 It also carries over where we did not give you a fair chance to take it, or did not tell you that you would lose it. That one is on us, not on you, and a blanket rule saying holiday can never be carried over does not survive it.
5.4 So: we will tell you before the year end if you have a balance left, in time to do something about it.
6. Rolled up holiday pay
6.1 Where holiday pay is paid as you go rather than when you take the leave, it is shown as its own line on your payslip at 12.07 per cent.
6.2 That line is the whole difference between it being lawful and being a problem. Holiday pay folded into an hourly rate so the rate looks bigger on the advert is where most agency pay disputes start, and it means you are paid nothing at all in the week you actually take off.
7. When we get your pay wrong
7.1 It happens. Missing hours on a timesheet is the usual cause, and the second is a client who has not returned one.
7.2 If the mistake is ours, we correct it as soon as we have checked it, not in next week's pay run. Being short by a hundred pounds for seven days because our system runs weekly is our problem to solve, not yours to absorb.
7.3 Two things that make it quick: keep your own note of your hours, and follow the client's signing in and out procedure even when nobody seems to be checking.
8. How and when you are paid
8.1 Into your own account, in your own name. We do not pay wages into somebody else's account, ever, for anybody. That is not administrative fussiness: several workers paid into one account is one of the clearest signs of forced labour, and refusing is how an agency stops being part of it. What the other signs are.
8.2 Payslip before the money, so you can check it before it lands rather than afterwards.
HIRINGUK LTD, company number 17414012. Holiday: how it builds up, how it is paid, how to book it, version 1.1. Reviewed at least once a year and whenever the law changes. © HIRINGUK LTD. This document is issued under Working Time Regulations 1998; Employment Rights Act 1996 sections 221 to 224.