Easter Holiday and annual leave entitlement potential issue!

With Christmas well and truly over, we are looking ahead to Easter and the potential issue some employers may encounter because of how Easter falls in 2024.

If your holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March and you provide the statutory minimum annual leave entitlement, then please read on to ensure you remain legally compliant.

In 2023, the Easter bank holidays fell on 7 and 10 April 2023. However, this year 2024, the Easter bank holidays fall on 29 March and 1 April 2024, so, if your holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March, the Easter break straddles two holiday years. In practice, if this is how your holiday year runs, it means that there are nine bank holidays in the current holiday year April 2023 to March 2024 (excluding the extra one in 2023 for the King’s Coronation), but only seven bank holidays in the forthcoming holiday year. The Easter bank holidays in 2025 both fall in April. Therefore, if you only provide 20 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays for full-time staff, which is the statutory entitlement in the UK, it means your workers will potentially face a one-day annual leave shortfall in the forthcoming holiday year, as that would only total 27 days, not 28 days.

To address this issue, your options are to:

• simply increase “ordinary” annual leave entitlement by one day in April 2024 to March 2025, so that full-time workers then receive 21 days plus seven bank holidays, or
• ask your workers to agree to temporarily vary their employment contracts so that, in the current holiday year, they will receive 19 days’ annual leave plus nine bank holidays and, in the forthcoming holiday year, they will receive 21 days plus seven bank holidays – this effectively asks them to carry forward one day of “ordinary” annual leave from 2023/24 to 2024/25 but ensures they receive the same overall annual leave entitlement (28 days) in both holiday years. This will only work though if they all have at least one day of annual leave remaining that can be carried forward.

If your employment contracts say that annual leave entitlement is 28 days (or 5.6 weeks) inclusive of all bank holidays, your contract wording already covers the issue, so you just need to honour that wording to ensure that your workers still receive 28 days in both holiday years.

Note also that this issue also won’t affect you if you have a different holiday year or if you contractually provide more annual leave than the statutory minimum entitlement.