Occasionally, HMRC may declare an additional national bank holiday due to special circumstances. While there's no statutory entitlement to this day off, employers can choose to include it as part of their employees’ annual leave entitlement, depending on the terms of their contracts.

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 your decision.

The bank holiday will be added to PayFit and applied to England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland by default.

Note: You can only make these changes once your PayFit account is in the annual leave year that includes the bank holiday.

For example, if your annual leave year runs from May to April and the additional bank holiday falls in May, you can't make changes until you've run your April payroll.

Check your employee's entitlement

Your next steps will depend on how bank holidays are worded in your employment contracts. Use the option below that best describes your employment contracts:

My employees are entitled to X days + bank holidays

You can choose whether to include the bank holiday or not.

If you choose to offer it, you don't need to make any changes.
If you choose not to offer this, simply disable the day in PayFit 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 make any changes.

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: