Holiday time: your right to a break

The not so good news
Unfortunately, you can’t take your holiday whenever you want to.

First of all, you have to give your employer twice as many days’ notice as the number of days’ holiday you wish to book. This means that if you want to take a two-week break, you need to notify your employer four weeks in advance.

Even if you follow this notice requirement, your employer is not under any obligation to comply with your request. Provided that they have given you notice equivalent to the suggested holiday period (i.e. one week’s notice for one week’s holiday), your employer can object to the dates you have requested, and even specify dates of their own choosing. In practice, employers tend to be quite flexible and are unlikely to dictate exact dates for their employees’ leave, but there are exceptions. For example, it is not unknown for factory workers to be required to take their leave when the factory is closed. If you’ve got a written contract, check out whether your employer has other administrative rules about taking holiday – but bear in mind that these rules can’t be more restrictive than the statutory requirements.

The second bit of bad news is that your employer can choose to include UK Bank holidays as part of your four weeks’ annual entitlement. This means that if you are given a day off on a Bank Holiday, you may find yourself with one less day’s holiday for the rest of the year. So-called Bank or Public Holidays are widely misunderstood – in fact, there is no real statutory right to be absent from work on these days at all!

Finally, if you don’t take all of your holidays in one leave year, you don’t have any right to roll over the remaining days to the next, or to claim a payment in lieu. Your ‘leave year’ might be defined in your contract. If not, and your employment began before 1 October 1998, the leave year will run from 1 October; otherwise, your leave year will run from the date on which you first joined the company.Next page: money and freelancers