Early Finish on a Friday

jamesd

See the "Calculating holiday entitlement" summary of the working time regulations.

The basic calculation is accruing 5.6 times the number of days at work each week as holiday and that many days not going to work as your holiday.

Now consider the logic: if you work Friday you can think of it as accruing half a day of holiday and using half a day of holiday, or as accruing a day off work and using a day off work. It doesn't matter which way you view it, you're still getting the correct proportion of holiday time accumulated and used if you take whole weeks on and off work.

Your present practice is effectively abusing your employer. You're accruing one whole day for each Friday (I assume - do correct me if you only accrue half a day in your own calculations). But then when taking it as holiday you're only counting it as a half day.

Another way of abusing it would be to count a Friday as a full day of work and then never take Fridays as holidays. This way you'd be taking more hours off per day of holiday than the hours you worked to accrue those holiday days.

An alternative and more strictly accurate way of calculating is to calculate accrual and use of holiday time in hours. If it was calculated in this way then each Monday through Thursday of work would accrue you enough hours of holiday to take more than one Friday off work. But each Friday would accrue less than a whole Monday through Thursday off.

Your employer will probably prefer you to use the whole days accrued and used calculation, since that is easiest unless you abuse it.

If you'd like a work opinion on this, just ask HR what they think is most sensible way to calculate it, without offering any opinion either way.

Don't expect them to accept you accruing whole days of holiday for each Friday but then using only half a day when you take the day off work. They will correctly see this as you exploiting your working hours arrangement to get more time off work. But they may be entirely happy to calculate in hours and use less hours if you take Friday off, since they still get the right number of working hours from you if it's done this way.

If you like having Fridays off work, ask to use the hours calculation method. It'll get you more days not at work.

Your employer is entitled to tell you what days you should take as holidays. Expect them to tell you to take whole weeks off, not days, if they think that you are abusing their system. That eliminates the chance to play the system by exploiting the different number of hours worked on a Friday.

Which is why I said ask for an opinion. They can be unpleasant about it or could be nice and let you take lots more Fridays off than you could take Tuesdays off.

Roobarb_73

I would agree that it should be calculated in hours, not days if you work odd hours. I work different hours, 8 hrs one day, 1 days at 7.5 hrs, 1 at 7 hrs and 1 at 5.5 hrs (a standard day would usually be 7 hrs) and I wouldn't expect to be having 7 hrs leave taken off me if I have a thursday off!