Paid annual leave

WTR minimum paid leave entitlement is 5.6 weeks (compared with four weeks required by the EWTD). There is no service requirement although accrual arrangements apply for new employees. Rights to further leave may arise from employment contracts. Legal rights for workers include:

• Regulation 13 leave (four weeks), which gives effect to the European Working Time Directive requirement.

• Regulation 13A leave (an additional 1.6 weeks), which is purely a matter of domestic law and represents the minimum number of bank holidays in a year, but need not be used for them.

• Regulation 14, which gives workers an entitlement to payment in lieu of the untaken statutory entitlement for that leave year upon termination of employment.

A week’s leave is the same length of time as the working week. This means that someone working five days a week is entitled to 28 days’ annual leave, while someone working three days a week is entitled to 16.8 days’ annual leave. Entitlement is capped at 28 days (although more generous contractual holiday entitlement can be negotiated).

Road transport workers covered by the RTR regulations obtain their statutory holiday entitlement from the WTR regulations. In contrast, workers in civil aviation (CAR) and the maritime and waterways sectors (FVR, IWR) obtain it under their own working time regulations (at the time that this booklet was published, these sector-specific regulations had yet to be amended to reflect the increase from four weeks’ leave under the WTR).