Workers with irregular hours or zero-hours contracts are entitled to paid holiday. The holiday entitlement calculator allows you to calculate how much holiday a worker on irregular hours or a zero-hours contract is entitled to within their current leave year. For casual workers with no normal hours, including workers on a zero-hours contract, the holiday pay they receive will be their average pay over the previous 52 weeks worked (taking the last whole week in which they worked and earned pay, ending on a Saturday, as the most recent week. Unless they are paid weekly on a day other than a Saturday – see previous section, The definition of a ‘week’ for the purpose of the holiday pay reference period’. The reference period must include the last 52 weeks for which they actually earned, and so excludes any weeks where no work was performed.[footnote 9] This may mean that the actual reference period takes into account pay data from further back than 52 weeks from the date of their leave. However it should go back no more than 104 weeks; if this gives fewer than 52 weeks to take into account, then the reference period is shortened to that lower number of weeks. A paid week will include a week in which the worker was paid any amount for work undertaken during that week. Only if no pay at all is received in a week, should it be discounted as part of the 52-week reference period. Example A worker has the following gross pay data: Table 5: Illustration for paid and non-paid weeks
WeekGross pay per weekPaid / unpaid week Week 1£300Paid Weeks 2-5£350Paid Week 6£0Unpaid Week 7£10Paid Weeks 8-22£100Paid Weeks 23-25£0Unpaid Weeks 25-40£400Paid Weeks 41-45£200Paid Weeks 46-48£0Unpaid Weeks 49-54£180Paid Weeks 55-59£150Paid An employer should discount weeks 6, 23-25 and 46-48 in table 5, which is 7 weeks, as there was no pay in these weeks, reflecting that the worker performed no work. As 7 weeks have to be discounted, the employer must go back a further 7 weeks to take the total to 52 weeks of pay data when calculating holiday pay for this period. These extra weeks are weeks 53-59 in table 5. The total pay over the 52 weeks is calculated by summing the pay for each week. The calculation is:
(1 × £300) + (4 × £350) + (1 × £10) + (15 × £100) + (15 × £400) + (5 × £200) + (6 × £180) + (5 × £150) = £12,040.
This is then divided by the 52 weeks-worth of data used to calculate the average: £12,040 ÷ 52 = £231.34. A week’s holiday taken in the week following would therefore be paid at a rate of £231.34 (which is the average weekly pay from the pay data in table 5).