Confirmed: Part-time holiday rule changes

Earlier this year, we highlighted the rules on employing staff on a part-time basis and how this may have changed due to an ongoing court case (Under 5, June 2022). The rules on how holiday pay for part-time workers, including those employed on a term-time only basis, has been confirmed by a new ruling by the Supreme Court which was announced in August.

Since the case of Brazel vs Harpur Trust in 2019, annual leave for any employee or worker, irrespective of the number of weeks they work in a year, is 5.6 weeks. This statutory minimum cannot be pro-rated down based on the assumption that the 5.6 weeks only applies to those who work 52 weeks a year.

The Supreme Court has now dismissed the Harpur Trust’s appeal against this decision, which confirms that part-time workers must receive the same amount of paid annual leave as those working a full year.

This means that employers who have previously calculated holidays using a pro-rated calculation may need to review how they allocate holiday entitlement and pay to ensure they comply with the ruling.

The ruling concludes: “The amount of leave to which a part-time worker under a permanent contract is entitled to is therefore not required to be, and under domestic law must not be, pro-rated to be proportional to that of a full-time worker.”

Workers employed on a casual or zero-hours basis, who are employed for less than 12 months, will not be impacted by this ruling and will still be entitled to holiday based on the number of actual hours they have worked.

Remember – all employees that work term-time only are considered to be part-time workers for the purposes of employment law. This is still the case regardless of whether or not they work ‘full-time’ hours during term-times.

Under the Part Time (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations, part-time employees should be treated the same as full-time employees in regards to the terms and conditions of their employment. As well as equality in holiday pay, this also means that they are entitled to equality in: rates of pay, training, annual leave, rest breaks, contractual benefits, pensions and selection for career advancement or promotion.