Holiday, Sick Leave and Family Leave: How Entitlement Keeps Building

One of the more counterintuitive parts of UK holiday law is that you keep earning annual leave while you are not working. Off sick for four months, on maternity leave for a year, on adoption or shared parental leave: the holiday keeps building the whole time. A lot of workers do not know this, and a lot of employers do not act on it until somebody asks.

What happens to that leave afterwards depends on which type of absence it was, and the rules are different enough that it is worth taking them one at a time.

The principle: leave accrues during statutory leave and sickness

Workers build up holiday during maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave, and during sick leave. It is the same 5.6 weeks as anyone else, accruing in the ordinary way.

The reason it matters is that leave you cannot take is not leave you have lost. Someone on maternity leave for the whole of a leave year cannot physically take annual leave during it, because you cannot be on two types of leave at once. So the law provides for it to be carried over instead.

Sickness: carry over, and the 18 month limit

If you are unable to take your holiday because you are off sick, you can carry it over. Two limits apply.

• You can carry over a maximum of four weeks, which is 20 days for someone working five days a week. The additional 1.6 weeks does not have to be carried over on sickness grounds.
• The carried-over leave must be used within 18 months of the end of the leave year in which it accrued. After that it is lost.

Some points that follow from this:

You can take annual leave while off sick. This surprises people, but it is allowed and sometimes sensible, because holiday pay is usually a good deal more than Statutory Sick Pay, which is currently up to £123.25 a week or 80% of normal weekly earnings, whichever is lower, for up to 28 weeks. If long-term sickness has moved you onto SSP alone, taking some annual leave can help. Your employer cannot force you to, but they generally cannot refuse a reasonable request either.

Falling ill during booked holiday. If you are taken ill while on annual leave, you can ask to convert those days back to sick leave and take the holiday later. Employers can require the same evidence they would for any other sickness absence, such as self-certification or a fit note. Ask at the time rather than afterwards.

Maternity, paternity, adoption and Shared Parental Leave

Holiday accrues throughout. Where a worker has been unable to take their leave because of family-related statutory leave, they can carry over their full holiday entitlement into the next leave year. That is more generous than the sickness position, which is capped at four weeks.

In practice this is why so many people return from maternity leave with a large holiday balance, and why returning at, say, 10 months and then taking a month of accrued annual leave is such a common pattern. It is entirely legitimate.

A few practical points:

• You cannot take annual leave during maternity leave. The two cannot overlap. That is precisely why the carry-over right exists.
• Bank holidays still count. If bank holidays are part of your 5.6 weeks and several fell during your leave, they accrue like the rest of your entitlement.
• Agree the plan before you go. Talking to your manager about the balance and roughly how you intend to use it removes a difficult conversation from your first fortnight back.

The 1.6 Weeks can be carried over by agreement anyway

Separately from sickness and family leave, the additional 1.6 weeks of the 5.6 week entitlement can be carried into the following leave year by agreement between worker and employer. For someone working five days a week, that is up to 8 days.

The four weeks of EU-derived leave is different: it is generally meant to be taken in the leave year it relates to, and cannot be carried over simply because it suits both parties. Sickness and family leave are the recognised exceptions.

When your employer prevents you taking leave

There is a further carry-over route that is less well known. Where an employer has not given a worker a reasonable opportunity to take their leave, or has not told them that untaken leave will be lost at the end of the year, the leave can carry over rather than being forfeited.

This puts a real obligation on employers. Simply having a "use it or lose it" policy is not enough if in practice leave requests are refused every time, or if nobody was ever told the balance existed. Employers are expected to encourage workers to take their leave and to warn them if it is about to be lost.

If your requests have been repeatedly refused because of staffing, keep the emails. That correspondence is the evidence that you were not given a reasonable opportunity.

Notice: who has to tell whom, and when

The default statutory rules, which your contract can override, work like this.

So an employer can direct you to take a week off, for a Christmas shutdown for example, provided they give you two weeks' notice. They can restrict when leave is taken during busy periods. What they cannot do is refuse to let you take your leave at all, and they cannot make a worker who is off sick take annual leave.

If leave is refused right up to the year end

Raise it in writing before the leave year ends, not after. Say how many days you have left, that you have tried to book them, and ask either for the days or for confirmation that they will carry over. Putting that in writing does two things: it often produces the days, and if it does not, it creates the record showing you were denied a reasonable opportunity to take them.

If the leave year has ended and the days have been wiped, the carry-over arguments above may still apply. Raise a grievance, and get advice from Acas before assuming the days are gone.

A note on Bank Holidays during absence

Bank holidays do not have to be given as paid leave, and where an employer includes them within the 5.6 weeks, they are simply part of your entitlement. If you are on maternity or long-term sick leave when they fall, they accrue like any other part of your allowance rather than being lost. Where bank holidays are given on top of the 5.6 weeks, what happens to them during absence depends on your contract, so check it.

To work out what you should have accrued across a period of absence, put the dates through the holiday entitlement calculator, and see the holiday entitlement guide and the FAQ for how the rest of the rules fit together.

This is general information rather than legal advice. Carry-over disputes turn on specific facts, so speak to Acas or an employment solicitor about your own situation.