At some point before December an email along these lines will probably reach you: the office closes from Christmas Eve until the new year, and everyone is expected to cover the gap from their annual leave. The natural reaction is a thumbs-up, and the sums come later, when you count how many days are left or realise that the week you were saving for February has just been spent. This year the sums are kinder than usual. Christmas Day 2026 falls on a Friday, the substitute bank holiday for Boxing Day is Monday 28 December, and New Year's Day 2027 is a Friday. In England and Wales, a shutdown from Thursday 24 December to Friday 1 January therefore uses just four days of leave for someone who works Monday to Friday: the 24th, 29th, 30th and 31st. Those four days buy eleven in a row, from Thursday 24 December to Sunday 3 January, with a return to work on Monday 4 January. Whether that arithmetic holds for you depends on what your contract says about bank holidays, and on a handful of rules about notice and carry-over that few employees have ever been shown.
Whether the bank holidays come out of your allowance
The statutory minimum for most people on a five-day week is 5.6 weeks of paid holiday, which GOV.UK puts at 28 days, and the same page says the entitlement is capped at 28 days however many days a week you work. An employer is allowed to count bank holidays inside that figure. Some do, so that "28 days" already includes Christmas Day, 28 December and New Year's Day, while others give the bank holidays on top. Acas tells workers to check their contract to see which applies, and this December the difference is easy to spot. If bank holidays are included, the Christmas break draws seven days from your balance (four working days plus three bank holidays), exactly as it would have done had the office stayed open. If they sit on top, the shutdown takes four days from your allowance and nothing more.
Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own bank holiday calendars; in Scotland, GOV.UK lists Monday 4 January 2027 as the substitute for 2 January, so a Scottish shutdown can cost a different number of days. Part-timers get the same 5.6 weeks pro rata, which is 16.8 days for someone working three days a week. Acas is clear that an employer cannot make you use a bank holiday as leave when it falls on a day you do not normally work. Someone who never works Mondays therefore keeps 28 December without it touching their balance, while a colleague on the same hours who does work Mondays may have it counted if the workplace is shut and their contract includes bank holidays in the allowance.
What your employer can require over Christmas
A Christmas closure is one of the few situations in which your employer, not you, picks the dates.
Acas's holiday guidance, last updated on 1 October 2026, says an employer can make workers take holiday on days that suit the business, and it names a Christmas shutdown as its own example. That holds even if the business stayed open over Christmas in earlier years, so a new closure does not need your agreement as long as the notice is right. By law the employer must tell you at least twice as many calendar days beforehand as the number of days it wants you to take. Acas's example is a five-day closure, which needs ten days' notice; for the four days of leave in a 24 December to 1 January shutdown the figure is eight calendar days, so the announcement has to come by roughly 16 December. Your contract can set a different notice period (Acas calls this a "relevant agreement"), which is worth checking before you assume the statutory figure applies. Because the count is in calendar days rather than working days, a weekend inside the notice period counts towards it.
If your balance cannot cover the closure, ask HR in writing how those days will be treated, and do it before the notice period runs out. Acas lists unpaid leave as something an employer can require only where the contract provides for it, so the answer depends on your wording and not on a general rule.
What happens to unused days when the leave year ends
Statutory leave is meant to be taken in the leave year, not banked. According to Acas, unless there is a relevant agreement (a workforce agreement, a collective agreement, or an agreement you can enforce, such as your employment contract), you must take your 5.6 weeks within the leave year, apart from genuine obstacles such as long-term sickness. The leave year is not necessarily the calendar year, because an employer can fix any twelve-month period, for example 1 April to 31 March, and where none is set it runs from the day you started. Someone whose year ends on 31 March faces no deadline on 31 December, whatever the shutdown email implies, so finding your own year-end is the first job. Extra leave above the statutory minimum is governed by your contract rather than the regulations, which means a 33-day allowance could be 28 statutory days that must be used and five contractual days with a carry-over rule of their own. Look for the carry-over clause in your contract or handbook, because it usually decides what happens to the last few days.
| Your situation | What Acas says happens to unused statutory leave |
|---|---|
| No agreement, and nothing has stopped you taking it | You must take it within the leave year |
| Your contract or another relevant agreement allows carry-over | You can carry over what the agreement allows |
| Your employer did not let you take it, did not encourage you to, or never told you untaken days would be lost | You can carry over a maximum of 4 weeks |
| You are on long-term sick leave | Up to 4 weeks can be carried over and must be used within 18 months of the end of the leave year in which it built up |
| Statutory leave such as maternity leave stopped you using it | You must be allowed to carry it into the next leave year |
The third row is the one that surprises people. Employers carry a legal responsibility to make sure workers can take the holiday they are entitled to, and Acas lists reminder emails, manager training and clear wording in booking systems as ways to show they encourage it. If your employer has never told you that untaken days will be lost and has turned down several requests, a carry-over of up to four weeks is a fair thing to raise. It is a fallback, though, and a weak plan: where the reminders have been sent and the requests were reasonably declined, that route becomes much harder to argue.
Before the closure notice arrives
Work out what the shutdown will cost you before you book anything else, because the rest of your allowance is whatever remains once those days are taken. Do not put a January city break in the diary until you know the number. The first steps are short, and your own contract may add more.
- Find your balance and your leave year in the HR system or the contract, and copy down any carry-over wording exactly as it appears.
- Put requests in writing and respect the notice rule that applies to you: by law, a request for 10 days off should go in at least 20 days before the leave starts, unless your contract sets something else.
- If a manager declines, ask for the reason. The employer must give notice of a refusal at least as long as the leave you asked for (Acas's example is a seven-day request, refused with at least seven days to spare) and cannot refuse to let you take any holiday at all.
- If you will not manage to use every day, agree the carry-over by email before the year ends rather than relying on a verbal "that should be fine".
Avoid leaving the whole balance until December. Every colleague with the same idea is competing for the same dates, and an employer is entitled to decline overlapping requests when it has a good business reason, which a team that cannot all be out in the same week usually does.
What the days are worth: pay, leaving and records
For regular-hours workers, GOV.UK says employers must pay at least four of the 5.6 weeks at your "normal" rate of pay, with the remaining 1.6 weeks at a "basic" rate. Normal pay includes commission, regular overtime and payments linked to length of service or professional qualifications, but not usually bonuses. For irregular-hours and part-year workers, all leave is paid at the normal rate. If your pay is built on regular overtime or commission and the December payslip shows only basic salary for your leave days, ask payroll to explain the calculation before the new year.
If you are planning to move jobs in the new year, Acas says any statutory holiday you have built up but not taken must be added to your final pay. The employer may instead ask you to take it during your notice period, and if you have taken more than you had accrued, it can take money from your final pay only if that was agreed in writing beforehand. Contractual days above the statutory minimum follow your contract, so do not assume they are paid out in the same way.
Since 6 April 2026 employers have had to keep detailed records of annual leave and holiday pay for at least six years, and GOV.UK says they may be fined if they cannot show it. The Fair Work Agency, established on 7 April 2026 according to Acas, is meant to take on enforcement of statutory holiday pay. A government consultation published on 30 June 2026 and closed on 22 September 2026 set out how that would work from 2027, and, as summarised by the law firm Veale Wasbrough Vizards, it floated penalties of up to 200% of any arrears and a six-year look-back. Those are proposals, and none of them has been confirmed as law.
Treat all of this as general information rather than legal advice; the Acas helpline on 0300 123 11 00 (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm) can look at your own contract. And on 31 December, or the last day of your own leave year, take a dated screenshot of your leave balance. It takes ten seconds, and it is the one record of your days that you control.