smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Introduction: As you probably know, part-time workers are entitled to equal treatment with full-time employees as a result of the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) regulations 2000 and to ensure you comply with this legislation and The Working Time Regulations you could use the following examples: Pro Rata Annual Holiday Leave: In regard to annual holiday entitlement, if he/she is contracted to work a set amount of days, he/she is entitled to four weeks’ holiday and if his/her working week is three days, therefore you multiply three days by four weeks and the total number of days he/she is entitled to is 12.  However, if he/she does not have a standard number of days each week because the contract states that they work variable days or hours, then you have to calculate the holiday pay over a 12-week period. If the employee changes to part-time working part way through the holiday year, you would have to pro rata the full-time holiday entitlement and the part-time entitlement, i.e. 20 days divided by the number of months/weeks full-time and say 12 days divided by the number or months/weeks part time. Pro Rata Bank Holidays: Remember that even though your part-time employee may not be scheduled to work on Bank Holidays, they are still entitled to a fraction of them over the year. There are eight Bank Holidays; divide this by five (because full-time workers have to work 5 days a week) and then multiply by the number of working days the part-time employee is expected to work each week based on their contract. Based on the employee working three days a week this would mean that they are entitled to 4.8 Bank Holidays paid leave per annum, and you would probably round up to five. Thank you to our payroll friends at Dataplan who gave us the examples used to illustrate this answer.  Here is a link to the ACAS website which provides guidance in regard to Holiday under the Working Time Regulations www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/i/c/AL03_1.pdf.