Music Teaching Holiday Pay Guidance Updated

All workers and employees are entitled to paid leave or holiday pay and our guidance page goes into this in detail for music teachers.

An update for calculating holiday pay for atypical work and part-year workers

Before Harpur Trust v Brazel, a July 2022 Supreme Court ruling, holiday pay for atypical work and part-year work was based on the current statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks a year.

An employer would typically calculate holiday pay as an additional 12.07% on top of the hourly wage, which was a way of converting the 5.6 weeks’ entitlement into a simple percentage which could then be added to hourly pay.

Following the ruling, a new calculation method should be applied as follows. Employers should first identify an average week’s pay earned by the worker. For part-year workers, this is calculated over a 52-week reference period before the calculation date.

When calculating the average week’s pay, employers must consider all pay earned over the 52-week period. Any weeks where no pay was earned must be ignored. Instead, earlier weeks up to 104 weeks before the calculation date must be brought into the calculation to make up 52 remunerated weeks.

Once the average week’s pay is identified, the formula to calculate holiday pay is:

the average week’s pay x 5.6 = statutory holiday pay

This new calculation method may mean that you are now entitled to more than 12.07%.

Holiday pay may fluctuate under the new calculation. Employers should now calculate the worker’s 52 remunerated work weeks each time the holiday calculation is performed.

If employers are paying their atypical and part-year workers under a holiday calculation that is more favourable than the new calculation method, they may continue to pay as they have been until now, provided that the part-year worker is receiving the equivalent of a minimum 5.6 weeks’ paid leave.