January is one of the busiest months for people booking holidays – our TV screens are full of adverts tempting us to do so!  It’s also the time that managers start receiving holiday requests from their staff which can be a challenging time – How do you / they manage requests that clash? Are there dates staff aren’t allowed to take holidays? How do you manage that policy? Those issues (and more) should be covered in your company / staff handbook. 

However, business owners may have an additional headache in 2018.  Every few years Easter falls particularly early and 2018 is one of those years.  This year, Good Friday is on 30th March and Easter Monday is 2nd April.  This means that, if your holiday year runs from April to March, the current year will have an extra bank holiday and next holiday year will have one less.

How you deal with this will depend on the wording of your employment contracts and what your company’s annual holiday allowance is.  However, you should bear in mind that the minimum requirement is 28 days including bank holidays, so unless you have planned in advance, you could end up giving an extra bank holiday this year and then having to allow an extra day next year to make the total up to 28 days. 

One solution to avoid this situation in future is to change your holiday year.  In this case, you would need to give employees plenty of notice and calculate a transitionary holiday allowance to make sure no-one loses out. 

Contact Richard on 07850 208701 if you want to discuss this