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Annual leave tracking software for UK employers: four things to check before you buy

A tracker built around one allowance of 5.6 weeks on one company-wide leave year gets UK law wrong. The law splits annual leave in two, sets the leave year per person, gives four rollover routes, and leaves bank holidays to the contract. Here is what to test on a demo.

by Mikko Kivelä··
Annual leave tracking software for UK employers: four things to check before you buy

UK annual leave does not fit one allowance of 5.6 weeks on one company-wide leave year. A tracker built that way shows wrong balances for some of your people. Check these four things on a demo.

  • Nobody is on a single allowance of 5.6 weeks. Workers are owed four weeks (reg 13(1)) plus 1.6 weeks (reg 13A(2)(e)), capped together at 28 days. The two parts roll over on different rules.
  • The leave year is set per worker. It starts on the date a relevant agreement gives. Without one, it starts on the anniversary of that person’s start date.
  • Rollover has four routes with different expiry dates. Statutory leave, sick leave capped at 18 months, by agreement, and where the employer failed to tell someone their leave existed.
  • Bank holidays are a contract term. Nothing in the regulations addresses them. GOV.UK guidance says employers may count them toward the 5.6 weeks. It does not require it.

The basics are the easy part. Almost every tool on a shortlist puts requests and approvals in one place, with a balance everyone can see. Nobody has to ask “how many days do I have left?” in the team channel. The differences appear in the cases a demo skips: the person on irregular hours, the one on sick leave across a year boundary, the one who joined in August.

Provisions are cited by regulation number in the Working Time Regulations 1998, for example (reg 13(1)).

What software do UK employers use to track annual leave?

Three tiers of tool, and the right one depends on how your people are employed. Dedicated leave trackers such as Timetastic, Leave Dates, Vacation Tracker, The Holiday Tracker and LeaveWizard do one job: a request, an approval, a shared chart, a running balance. UK small-business people platforms such as CharlieHR, Sage HR, Access PeopleHR and Breathe put annual leave next to employee records and documents. Broader people operations systems such as Personio, BambooHR and Taito.ai run it as one process among onboarding, attendance and pre-payroll. Those are the tools available in September 2026.

Price and interface separate them on a shortlist. UK employment law separates them on the four points below.

What should you check before you buy?

Test these four in a demo. Use your own difficult cases. The vendor’s examples will be the simple ones.

What to check Why it matters Provision
Which time-off policy each person is on Four weeks and 1.6 weeks roll over on different rules. Irregular-hours and part-year workers get neither. They accrue 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period reg 13(1), 13A(2)(e), 15B
When each person’s leave year starts It follows a relevant agreement, or failing that their own start-date anniversary. One shared year is a contractual choice the employer has to make reg 13(3), 13A(4), 15B(7)
How rollover is handled Four routes expiring differently: statutory leave, sick leave capped at 18 months, by agreement, and employer failure reg 13(14)–(18), 13A(7), 15D
Whether bank holidays count toward the allowance Nothing in the regulations addresses them. The contracts decide whether they count GOV.UK guidance

Two of these are where trackers most often go wrong.

For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers are on a different system entirely. They accrue on the last day of each pay period, capped at 28 days a year. A fraction of an hour rounds up to a full hour once it reaches 30 minutes. A tool built around a fixed annual allowance cannot express that. It will either refuse the worker or show a wrong balance. Ask to see one accruing across two pay periods.

The fourth rollover route is the less obvious one. It applies where the employer did not do one of three things:

  • recognize someone’s right to leave
  • give them a reasonable opportunity to take it
  • warn them it would be lost

That leave rolls over, and it keeps rolling over until the employer fixes the failure. It makes leave tracking a liability question. A tool that shows balances and never prompts anyone to use them does not help you there.

The government’s holiday entitlement calculator gives the allowance for a given working pattern. It returns days, shifts or hours only, never a monetary figure. For what the employer pays for that leave, our holiday pay calculator covers the irregular-hours case.

Before the first demo, list the people these checks apply to, starting with whoever is not on fixed hours.

When is a dedicated leave tracker the right buy?

Earlier than most teams plan for. Up to about ten people under one manager, on a single flexible shared policy, a spreadsheet does the job. Everyone is on the same leave year, the manager already knows who is away, and nothing needs reconciling more than once a year.

Four things end that, and most companies reach more than one of them in the same quarter. Headcount grows past what one person can track alone. A second and third team appear, each with its own approver. Part-time employees arrive whose leave has to be pro-rated, and irregular-hours workers whose hours change week to week. Then a second country, with its own statutory minimum and its own public holidays. From there, time off and attendance are recurring admin work. They also carry a compliance risk: one employee’s leave calculated wrong can become an employment tribunal claim.

That is where a dedicated tracker is most useful. It fits while your people are salaried, on regular hours, and on one shared leave year you have written into contracts. In that setup the four checks above reduce to something a good wall chart handles well. A tool costing a few pounds per person a month will then serve you for years.

It stops being the right buy at a predictable point: the first person you employ on irregular or part-year terms. Long-term sickness crossing a year boundary does it too, as does the first person who asks which part of their balance expires and when. None of those is an edge case at 50 people.

For more on the pay side, see holiday pay for irregular-hours and part-year workers. The UK employment compliance guide covers the rest of what employers owe.

How does Taito.ai help with this?

You set up your time-off policies once. From then on Taito.ai accrues leave for every employee automatically, each on their own accrual cycle, which follows their leave year. Salaried employees accrue against their working pattern. Irregular-hours and part-year employees accrue 12.07% of the hours they actually worked, each pay period. Nobody updates a balance by hand. No balance stays wrong until someone notices.

Requests and approvals run in Slack, so most of your team never logs in. When someone has leave that is about to expire, Taito.ai tells them while they can still book it.

See how Taito.ai handles time off.

Sources

Disclaimer

Taito.ai does not provide legal, tax or accounting advice. This article is general information about the law as it stood on the date above, not advice on your situation, and it is not a substitute for it. Rates and thresholds change. Check with a qualified adviser before acting on anything here.

Frequently asked questions

What software do UK employers use to track annual leave and statutory holiday entitlement?
The market splits three ways. Dedicated leave trackers cover the request, the approval and the running balance, and stop there. Examples are Timetastic, Leave Dates, Vacation Tracker, The Holiday Tracker and LeaveWizard. UK small-business people platforms such as CharlieHR, Sage HR, Access PeopleHR and Breathe put leave alongside employee records and documents. Broader people operations systems such as Personio, BambooHR and Taito.ai run leave as one process among onboarding, attendance and pre-payroll. That is the market as of September 2026. Choose by how your people are employed. A small salaried team on one shared leave year is well served by the cheapest name on the list. Anyone on irregular hours accrues under a different rule entirely, and a tool built around a fixed annual allowance cannot express it. Ask any vendor to demo that worker before you commit, whichever tier you shop in.
Does annual leave tracking software handle the 12.07% accrual for irregular-hours workers?
Some do and some do not. It is the single most useful question to ask a vendor. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers do not get 5.6 weeks at all. They accrue annual leave on the last day of each pay period. The rate is 12.07% of the hours they worked, capped at 28 days a year (reg 15B). A fraction of an hour under 30 minutes is dropped, and 30 minutes or more is rounded up to a full hour. A tracker built around a fixed annual allowance cannot express this. It will either refuse the worker or show them a wrong balance without flagging it. Ask the vendor to show you a part-year worker accruing across two pay periods. If the demo only ever shows salaried employees, treat it as a no.
Can unused annual leave be rolled over to the next leave year in the UK?
Sometimes, and there are four separate routes with different expiry dates. Leave untaken because the worker was on statutory leave, such as maternity leave, rolls into the following leave year (reg 13(14)). Leave untaken because of sick leave also rolls over. It has to be used within 18 months of the end of the leave year it arose in (reg 13(15)). The extra 1.6 weeks rolls over one year only where a relevant agreement provides for it (reg 13A(7)). It has no sick-leave route at all. The fourth route covers employer failure: the employer did not tell someone they had leave, did not give them a reasonable chance to take it, or did not warn them it would be lost. That leave rolls over until the end of the first full leave year in which the failure stops (regs 13(16) to 13(18)). Ask a vendor to show each route separately, with its own expiry date.
Do all employees have to be on the same leave year?
No, and assuming they do is a common source of wrong balances. A worker's leave year starts on whatever date a relevant agreement sets (reg 13(3)). Where no agreement covers it, the leave year starts on the anniversary of the day their employment began. The same rule applies to irregular-hours and part-year workers (reg 15B(7)). The extra 1.6 weeks always follows whatever the four weeks does (reg 13A(4)). So a company-wide 1 January or 1 April leave year is a contractual choice, not a default the law supplies. The employer has to make it and write it down. Where the contracts are silent, there are as many leave years as there are start dates. Check what your contracts say before you configure a tracker. Otherwise the tracker will apply one shared year to everyone, and the balances will not match the law.
Can an employer pay an employee instead of giving them their annual leave?
Not for statutory annual leave while they are still employed. The four weeks cannot be replaced by a payment in lieu except where employment ends (reg 13(9)(b)). The same bar applies to irregular-hours and part-year workers (reg 15B(6)). On termination the employer must pay for leave accrued and untaken (reg 15E). There is one narrow exception during employment. For irregular-hours and part-year workers only, holiday pay may lawfully be rolled up as a 12.07% uplift on ordinary pay (reg 16A). It is paid with ordinary pay each pay period, and the payslip has to show it. That mechanism does not extend to anyone else. It is a payroll arrangement, and it does not cancel any leave. So treat a buy-out feature in a leave tracker with care. For salaried employees, buying out statutory leave mid-year is not something the regulations permit, whatever the tool lets you click. Contractual leave above the statutory minimum is a different question, and the contracts govern it.

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