Holiday pay records: the new 2026 rules employers must follow
Since 6 April 2026, UK employers have had a new legal duty to keep records showing they comply with their workers’ holiday and holiday pay entitlements. The records must be kept for six years, and failing to keep adequate records is a criminal offence carrying an unlimited fine. This one caught a lot of employers off guard, because it was not in the government’s published roadmap and arrived with barely a week’s notice. This guide sets out exactly what the rule requires, what you need to record, and the one nuance most coverage gets wrong: the duty is live now, but active enforcement is not.
This article is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. For your specific circumstances, take qualified employment law advice.
What changed on 6 April 2026
Until April 2026, there was no specific legal duty on most UK employers to keep records of the holiday their workers took. Keeping them was good practice, but the only hard record-keeping duty under the Working Time Regulations related to working time, not holiday.
That changed with the Employment Rights Act 2025. A new provision, Regulation 16B of the Working Time Regulations 1998, now requires all employers to keep records adequate to show they are complying with workers’ annual leave entitlement, including the leave taken and the pay for it. The duty came into force on 6 April 2026 through a late commencement order, which is why it surprised so many employers: it had been left out of the government’s implementation timeline entirely.
The duty in three lines
Keep records adequate to show compliance with holiday entitlement and holiday pay.
For six years from the date each record is made.
Or it is a criminal offence, punishable by an unlimited fine.
What you need to record
The rule does not prescribe a format. The Act allows records to be created, maintained and kept in whatever manner the employer reasonably thinks fit, so a well-kept digital system is fine, and so in principle is anything else that is genuinely adequate. What matters is that the records are enough to show how holiday entitlement and pay are worked out, approved, taken and paid.
In practice, that means keeping:
- Each worker’s holiday entitlement, and the leave they have actually taken
- Holiday pay calculations and the dates payments were made
- The variable pay that feeds into holiday pay, such as overtime, commission and bonuses
- Any payments made in lieu of leave, including for carried-over leave
The duty covers all eligible workers, not just salaried staff on fixed hours. That specifically includes people on irregular hours and part-year workers, who are often the hardest to track and where holiday pay errors are most common.
The nuance most coverage misses: enforcement is not live yet
Here is the part worth being precise about, because a lot of the alarm around this rule overstates the immediate risk.
The duty is in force now. But the body expected to enforce it, the Fair Work Agency, which launched on 7 April 2026, does not yet have its holiday pay enforcement powers switched on. The regulations transferring those powers have not been made, and the agency has said it will prepare to begin holiday pay enforcement in 2027.
So the honest position is this: the legal obligation applies from 6 April 2026, and records you fail to keep from that date cannot be recreated later. But you are not going to be prosecuted next week. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to get your record-keeping right now, quietly, while there is time, so that whenever enforcement does begin you already have six years of clean records building up rather than a gap dating back to April 2026.
Why spreadsheets are the weak point
Most holiday pay problems do not come from bad intent. They come from records that are scattered, incomplete or lost. A holiday tracked on a wall planner, a payment worked out in a spreadsheet that gets overwritten, a leaver whose records vanish when their mailbox is closed: none of that is adequate under the new duty, and none of it survives six years reliably.
This is where the new rule and good practice point the same way. Holiday and absence management software records entitlement, requests, approvals and pay automatically, keeps it for as long as you need, and produces it on demand. Compliance stops being a manual task somebody has to remember and becomes a by-product of running holiday properly. It also keeps the variable-pay elements, the overtime and commission that make holiday pay calculations go wrong, tied to the record rather than reconstructed after the fact.
What to do now
You do not need to panic, but you do need to act, because the clock on the six-year records started in April 2026.
- Check how you currently record holiday taken and holiday pay, and be honest about whether it would stand up as adequate
- Make sure you are capturing the variable pay elements that affect holiday pay, not just the days off
- Confirm records are being retained for six years, including for people who leave
- Pay particular attention to irregular-hours and part-year workers, where the risk is highest
If your current setup relies on spreadsheets or memory, moving holiday onto a system that records it automatically is the surest way to meet the duty without adding to anyone’s workload. Holding that data also brings responsibilities of its own, which our guide to UK GDPR and time and attendance data covers. For the wider legal detail on working time and holiday, the position is set out on gov.uk.
See how automatic holiday records work
