Due to special circumstances, HMRC may declare an additional national bank holiday. There's no statutory entitlement to this bank holiday, but employers may include it as part of a worker’s leave entitlement.
When your PayFit account is in the annual leave year that includes the national bank holiday, you should check your employee's entitlement in PayFit matches
The bank holiday will be added to PayFit and applied to England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland by default. Depending on your employee’s employment contracts, you should decide if you’ll offer this bank holiday to employees.
Note: The following instructions apply only once your PayFit account is in the annual leave year, which contains the national bank holiday.
For example, if your annual leave year runs from May to April and the bank holiday falls in May. You can't apply these settings until you run your April payroll, when your PayFit account is in May.
Check your employee's entitlement
My employees are entitled to X days + bank holidays
You can choose whether or not to include the bank holiday but otherwise, there’s no need to adjust any employee’s annual leave entitlement. If you choose not to offer this to employees, you can disable the option by following the steps below.
My employees are entitled to X days holiday, including bank holidays
There is no statutory entitlement to time off for bank holidays, but employers may include bank holidays as part of a worker’s leave entitlement.
If you choose to allow employees to take this day as a bank holiday, you’ll need to increase their annual entitlement by one day to account for this.
If you choose not to allow employees to take this day as a bank holiday, you’ll need to disable this option.
My employees are entitled to X days holiday and X bank holidays
Where the number of bank holidays is specified in the employment contract, there is no statutory entitlement to time off for bank holidays, but employers may include bank holidays as part of a worker’s leave entitlement. Otherwise, they might ask the employee to take the day as part of their standard annual leave entitlement.
If you choose to allow employees to take this day as a bank holiday, you’ll need to increase their annual entitlement by one day to account for this.
If you choose not to allow employees to take this day as a bank holiday, you’ll need to disable this option.
If you choose to allow employees to take this day as annual leave, you don't need to take any further action.
Increasing an employee’s annual entitlement
Before increasing your employee’s annual holiday entitlement, we recommend you run a report showing each employee’s current entitlement. To do this;
From the left, choose Reports, then Company reports.
Under the HR reports section, click Leaves.
Scroll down to the Leave summary per employee and click Excel.
All employees have the same annual entitlement
You can increase the annual entitlement at a company level, which will be applied to all employees.
From the left, choose Company settings, then Payroll set-up.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit annual leave.
Increase the number in How many days of annual leave would you like to give your employees? by one.
Click Next, then Save.
Some employees have a different annual entitlement
In this scenario, you might prefer to increase the annual entitlement at a company level, then manually adjust the remaining employee’s entitlements manually or by bulk import.
To increase the entitlement at a company level:
Click Reports on the left, then Payroll set-up.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit annual leave.
Increase the number in How many days of annual leave would you like to give your employees? by one.
Click Next, then Save.
Then, to adjust individual holiday entitlements by bulk import:
Tip: You can also amend this at an employee level through the Leaves tab, then under the Annual leave section, click Settings.
From the left, choose Imports then More imports.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit annual leave settings.
Click Download a template.
Manually adjust any entitlements in column D, Yearly annual leave entitlement (in days).
Save and close your Excel file.
From the Upload your filled-in file window on PayFit, add the file you’ve just saved.
All employees have different annual entitlements
To adjust individual holiday entitlements by bulk import:
Tip: You can also amend this at an employee level through the Leaves tab, then under the Annual leave section, click Settings.
From the left, click Imports then More imports.
Under the Leaves section, click Edit annual leave settings.
Click Download a template.
Manually adjust any entitlements in column D, Yearly annual leave entitlement (in days).
Save and close your Excel file.
From the Upload your filled-in file window on PayFit, add the file you’ve just saved.
Disable the bank holiday
This option removes the bank holiday from PayFit so it becomes a normal working day for your employees.
Under Company settings on the left, click Payroll set-up.
In the Leaves section, click Edit annual leave.
Toggle on the I do not want <date> to be a bank holiday for my employees option.
Click Next and then Save.