Holiday pay records: the six-year duty in practice
Pick three people from your site: one on fixed hours, one whose hours change week to week, and one who left this year. For each, try to answer five questions from your records alone: how much leave they built up, how much they took, what they were paid for it, whether they were told about leave they might lose, and what was settled when they left. Give yourself twenty minutes. If any answer depends on someone's memory or a wall planner that gets wiped in January, that is the gap this post helps you close.
Since 6 April 2026 it has been a legal duty in Great Britain to keep those answers, and to keep them for six years.
What changed on 6 April 2026
The Employment Rights Act 2025 added a new regulation 16B to the Working Time Regulations 1998. An employer must keep records "adequate to show whether the employer has complied with" the annual leave rules, and keep each record for six years from the date it was made. You may keep them "in such manner and format as the employer reasonably thinks fit". The law asks for no particular form or software, only that the record proves the point.
Failing to keep them is now a criminal offence under regulation 29, with a fine on conviction.
The second half of the news is who will ask. The Fair Work Agency, launched in April 2026, takes over holiday pay enforcement from 2027. Its consultation of 30 June 2026 proposes that the agency can look back six years, matching the record-keeping period, but not before Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. It proposes a penalty of 200% of the arrears owed, between £100 per case and £20,000 per worker. Those settings were proposals when the consultation closed on 22 September 2026, and the final rules may differ.
Two limits on all of this. The rules cover England, Wales and Scotland; employment law is devolved in Northern Ireland. And this post summarises the regulations for the person who builds the rota. It is not legal advice; your HR adviser or solicitor decides how it applies to your contracts.
What "adequate" has to cover
Regulation 16B doesn't list columns. It points at the rules the records must prove. Read side by side, each rule names a fact you need to be able to produce, and on most sites that fact is written down in a different place from the others.
| The rule (Working Time Regulations 1998) | What your record must be able to show | Where it usually lives | The usual gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reg 13 and 13A: 5.6 weeks' leave a year | Each person's entitlement for the leave year, and the leave year's dates | HR file or contract | Part-timers' pro-rata figure worked out once and never updated |
| Reg 15B: irregular-hours and part-year workers | Hours worked in each pay period, and the 12.07% accrued from them | Time clock or timesheets | Accrual calculated in someone's head at the end of the year |
| Reg 16: payment for leave | What each day of leave was paid, and how the rate was worked out | Payroll | Leave days in one system, pay in another, nothing joining them |
| Reg 14 and 15E: leaving part-way through a year (15E for irregular-hours and part-year workers) | The untaken leave on the leaving date, and the payment made for it | Payroll, leaver's file | Wall planner wiped, so the leave taken can't be counted |
| Reg 13(16)–(17): carry-over | That you gave a real chance to take leave, encouraged it, and warned what would be lost | Emails, team briefings | The warning was spoken, not written |
The last row is the one rota builders underrate. Under regulation 13(16) and (17), if an employer doesn't give a worker a reasonable opportunity to take leave, doesn't encourage them to, or doesn't tell them that untaken leave will be lost, the worker can carry it forward. A rota that never had room for someone's holiday is part of that story. A written reminder sent in October is the record that answers it.
flowchart LR R[Rota: who was planned] --> T[Time record: hours worked] T --> A[Leave built up] L[Leave requests and approvals] --> B[Leave taken] A --> Y[One leave record per person] B --> Y N[Year-end reminder sent] --> Y Y --> P[Payroll: what leave was paid] P --> S[Six years of proof]
The facts are born in four places: the rota, the time record, leave approvals and the reminder. Payroll only ever sees the result. If you can join them per person, you have the record; if you can only show the payroll end, you can prove what you paid but not whether it was right.
A worked example: one irregular-hours picker
This example is illustrative: a picker whose contracted hours vary, paid monthly, in their first leave year under the 12.07% rule. Under regulation 15B, leave accrues on the last day of each pay period at 12.07% of the hours worked in that period. Fill in the right-hand column with one of your own people.
| Pay period | Hours worked | Leave accrued (× 12.07%) | Leave taken | Running balance | Your number |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September | 140 | 16.90 h | 0 h | 16.90 h | |
| October | 168 | 20.28 h | 0 h | 37.18 h | |
| November | 96 | 11.59 h | 16 h (two 8-hour shifts, mid-month) | 32.77 h |
The November leave was taken from the 37.18 hours already built up; that month's 11.59 hours were added on 30 November. Every figure in the table can be rebuilt from two inputs, hours worked and leave taken, and that is what makes it adequate: anyone can check it six years from now without asking the person who set it up.
Look at where the November hours came from. In this example the 96 is low partly because the picker was on leave for two shifts. Regulation 15B counts hours worked; what accrues during sickness and statutory leave is set separately in regulation 15C. If your time record mixes paid leave into worked hours, nobody can tell later which rule produced the figure. Keep worked hours and leave in separate columns.
The record, one row per event
The simplest layout that answers every row of the table is a ledger, one line per event, never edited after the fact. A correction is a new line that says what it corrects.
| Column | Example | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Picker, ID 0412 | The record must be per worker |
| Date the entry is about | 30 Nov 2026 | Proves when the leave was built up or taken |
| Type | Accrued / taken / carried / expired / paid on leaving / correction | Separates the events the rules care about |
| Hours (or days) | +11.59 h | The quantity, in one unit for the whole site |
| Based on | 96 hours worked, November | Lets someone rebuild the figure |
| Entered by, and when | Shift manager, 1 Dec 2026 | Who is answerable for it |
| Note | Year-end reminder emailed 1 Oct | Carries the evidence for carry-over |
Keep pay amounts in payroll, but give every leave line something payroll can match it to, such as the pay period. Don't delete a leaver's lines. The six years run from when each line was made, not from when the person left.
Run the twenty-minute test this week
- Choose the three people from the opening: fixed hours, varying hours, and a leaver.
- For each, write down entitlement, accrued, taken, paid and carried for this leave year, from records only.
- Note where each answer came from. More than two places per person means a join someone does by hand.
- Check that the leaver's leave taken can still be counted after their rota line was removed.
- Find the written warning about losing untaken leave. If there isn't one, send it before your leave year ends.
Whatever fails the test is your list, in the order to fix it. Start with the leaver: theirs is the record that can't be rebuilt once it is gone.
Where Fivexer fits, and where it doesn't
Fivexer keeps the leave side of this record as a ledger: every accrual, leave taken, carry-over, expiry and leaving settlement is a dated line with who wrote it, and the lines stay when a worker leaves. Leave for irregular-hours staff can accrue from the hours in its time record, which keeps worked hours and paid leave apart. Under the UK rules preset, leave isn't marked as lost at year end until a year-end notice has been recorded.
The concession: Fivexer holds hours and days, not money. The pay half of regulation 16B, what each day of leave was paid and how the rate was worked out, stays in your payroll. And it can only hold records from the day you start using it; the months before that stay wherever they are now, and still count towards your six years.
Fivexer checks the rules you configure. It doesn't decide whether your records are adequate; that judgement, and the pay calculation, remain yours.
If the test showed your hours and your leave live in different places, see how Fivexer's time and attendance writes both from the shift itself.