Zero-Hours Contract Holiday Entitlement UK: 12.07% Rules & Pay (2026)

Yes. Almost everyone who works under a zero-hours or casual contract in the UK is legally classified as a 'worker' (or an employee) under the Working Time Regulations 1998 and is entitled to 5.6 weeks of statutory paid holiday per leave year from day one of their engagement.

For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, the UK government introduced dedicated statutory rules (Regulations 15A to 16A) for 'irregular-hours workers' and 'part-year workers'. Under Regulation 15A, a worker is an irregular-hours worker if the number of paid hours that they will work in each pay period during the term of their contract is, under the terms of their contract, wholly or mostly variable. True zero-hours and casual bank contracts almost always meet this definition, whereas a part-time employee with fixed contractual hours (for example, 16 hours every week) does not.

You can check any zero-hours worker's exact hours accrued and pay owed in seconds using our free Irregular Hours 12.07% Holiday Calculator.

Where an irregular-hours worker's leave year begins on or after 1 April 2024, statutory annual leave accrues on the last day of each pay period (for example, weekly or monthly) at the rate of 12.07% of the hours the worker actually worked during that pay period. Why 12.07%? Because the statutory entitlement is 5.6 weeks out of 52 weeks, leaving 46.4 working weeks in the year, and 5.6 divided by 46.4 equals 12.07%.

Regulation 15B includes a specific rounding rule for accrued time off: if the calculation for a pay period produces a fraction of an hour, you round down to the nearest whole hour if the fraction is less than 30 minutes (0.5 hours), and round up to the next whole hour if the fraction is 30 minutes (0.5 hours) or more. A worker cannot accrue more than 28 days of statutory holiday in a single leave year.

Remember that zero-hours workers still accrue statutory holiday while off on sick leave or statutory family leave (such as maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental, or neonatal care leave). Under Regulation 15C, you calculate the holiday accrued during sick or family leave by averaging the hours the worker worked per week across the 52-week reference period before the absence started (including zero-hour weeks within that 52-week window, unlike the pay reference period) and applying 12.07% to those average hours.

Employers have two lawful options for paying statutory holiday to irregular-hours workers. First, you can hold the accrued hours in a holiday balance and pay the worker when they book and take time off, using their average pay across the last 52 paid weeks (skipping zero-pay weeks and looking back up to 104 weeks).

Second, under Regulation 16A, you can use rolled-up holiday pay: paying an uplift of 12.07% on top of all normal remuneration earned in each pay period. If you use rolled-up holiday pay, you must never hide it inside the worker's headline hourly wage (which is unlawful). The payslip must show the normal hourly pay and a separate, itemised line showing the 12.07% holiday pay addition.

Even when you pay rolled-up holiday pay every week or month, you must still allow and encourage zero-hours workers to take actual time off work so they get rest and recuperation. When they take those accrued holiday days, the time off itself is unpaid because the holiday pay was already paid out across their payslips.