10 December 2024
This is a quick reminder that if you pay irregular hour and part-year workers, and your holiday year starts from January 2025, that you can start to implement the holiday pay reforms which apply to holiday leave years starting after 1 April 2024.
To recap, you can only use a percentage-based method to calculate holiday entitlement for irregular hour and part-year workers; please see the definitions of those below:
Irregular hours and part-year workers definitions
Regulations have been set out to clarify how to calculate holiday entitlement and pay for irregular hour and part-year workers. New definitions of these workers have been created, allowing employers to correctly identify the workers and process compliantly.
- Irregular hours worker – an employee’s contracted hours are mostly or completely variable. Including those on casual or zero hours contracts.
- Part-year worker – an employee is contracted to work part of the year, resulting in periods of at least one week during the year that they’re not required to work and will not be paid.
For example, a seasonal worker who picks fruit in the spring and summer but isn’t contracted or paid to do any work in the autumn or winter would meet the definition of a part-year worker.
An example to be mindful of is within educational establishments, where teachers and teaching assistants are only required to work approximately 38 weeks of the year, due to the school holidays. They would qualify as a part-year worker if their contract reflects there are periods of time that last more than a week when they are not contracted to work and do not receive pay. This will still apply if their yearly pay is split equally between 12 months.
To find out more about how to calculate the holiday entitlement of those two categories of workers, please head over to our “Holiday pay and entitlement overview” news article now.
Employment law is devolved in Northern Ireland, so this article only applies to workers in England, Scotland and Wales.
Information provided in this news article may be subject to change. Please make note of the date of publication to ensure that you are viewing up to date information.