Carrying over annual leave

Kryton57
Here we go. I believe the standard quote is, “this will not end well…”

Please don’t tell us you’re in the fire service

No, an obscure part of the civil service, I do 9-10 hour days but there’s an overtime payment ban so the extra hours build up to silly amounts of flexi time 😕

(public sector)

we can carry over 40 hours (work shifts so leave etc calculated and taken/awarded in hours not days).

Reason most employers restrict carry over is financial – carried over holiday is an accrual on the balance sheet, so has a direct impact on P&L,

Which is why most business who permit the carry over also require them ti be used by year end.

in my job it’s upto 13 days annual leave carry forward now (IOM Civil Service) plus we have upto 18 days flexi leave each year. nice when the tracks start 2 miles from work 🙂

Not allowed for me, don’t really understand why, our busiest time is nov/dec, quietest is jan/feb.

Up to 36 hours leave automatically carried over here. Makes no difference to me as I usually carry over most of it…its sort of a backup week that I keep back ‘just in case’.

Occasionally work will decide we can take over 72hrs when they are struggling to keep up with the workstack over winter so it can have benefits for the employer as well.

We don’t let ours carry any over , plenty of time in the year to do take it 😀

Having said that we may let them carry some over if they ask nicely

My leave is in hours (prison service) & I get 320 hrs a year leave, based on a 39 hr week, & can carry 70 hrs over, which I always do cos we can’t usually get leave when we want/need it!

We can carry 5 officially, in practice there’s a bit more discretion since the reason people want to carry more is our erratic workload, very seasonal

Strikes me from past experience that there’s a correlation between the sort of boss that won’t consider letting people carry leave on, and the sort of boss that likes to make it very hard to take holidays at anything but terrible times.

3 to be used by march, but given the maximum annual leave is 25 days , it rarely gets carried over.

Last real job was carry 10 I think and able to borrow 5. Then there was the extra we got for working a 37hr week which was 13 days but had to be taken in the year and then flexi. And yes it was former government….

No not at all (use it or loose it) used to be 5 days to be taken within 2 months but since it changed from “personnel” run by a retired navel captain to “HR” run by a hard nosed career woman its all about “the business”

Which as tomhoward said seems silly as Nov/Dec is silly busy for us so we often end up short staffed during those times as the firm has a whole myriad of combinations of staff that can’t be off at the same time irrespective of trade requirements (I still have 11 days to take) but my deputy was off sick for 5 months of this year & I’m not allowed to take holiday when he’s off.
I also have 7 lieu days(should be taken in the month accrued but must be taken in the same calendar year) to take from various times when I’ve worked 24 hrs straight through or had to come in at the weekend.

I worked out that given the combinations I have 32 days to take and about 30 days in the year when it would be possible?

MrOvershoot – Member

I worked out that given the combinations I have 32 days to take and about 30 days in the year when it would be possible?

Hah, yes. When I was back in the bank we were told one day that there was a non-negotiable new policy, only one person off at a time. Went and did the maths, between the team we had about 400 days of holiday to take and only 250 working days to take them in.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to let staff carry over holidays (there are some circumstances it is appropriate). Annual leave is important for the employee, it is valuable downtime for them to de-stress. Usually people carry over holuday because they haven’t been organised enough to plan it in across the year (I appreciate some HR people fail to do the maths regarding the rules as above) which is the compounded the following year by having even more leave to manage. It is important it is spread across the year, leaving loads to Christmas is unfair on colleagues who have planned it properly.

Taking the 2nd and 3rd of Jan I don’t really count as carry over.

So before making the decision think of the future impact on the employee and their colleagues and any precedent you may be setting as well as practical business considerstions.

When the leave policy allows for more days than the legal minimum I see no problem with carrying over a few days. An employee may be perfectly happy to take 4 weeks one year knowing they can carry the extra week and take 6 the following year for a one-off longer holiday, getting married, or even starting a new man shed project 🙂

It’s not going to affect work life balance…inability to book leave due to staffing levels and being forced to use up leave at unappealing times of the year is no doubt a much bigger work:life/moral killer than ensuring and employee uses/loses their leave allowance within 365 days.

In the company like mine it’s difficult getting Christmas leave until the last minute when they decide to relax the thresholds so the carry over also allows us some slack if we use more or less than expected. This year I have 1 day approved, but it’s likely they will offer more on Christmas eve.

Another point to remember is if sickness prevents you using your annual leave entitlement for the year

Under those circumstances you are allowed to carry over up to four weeks unused leave to the next year

Many firms try to deny this including the one spooky b329 works for, but it is EC legislation and they have to abide by it

Some saying the holiday carry over is bad – you can only ever do it for 1 year maximum. Then the following year you can only carry over your entitlement, it doesn’t compound year after year.

E.g. 2013 to 2014 – first year of employment I can carry over 5.
2014 to 2015 I can carry over 5, but got 5 from 2013 to 2014, so I’ve got to use up my allowance.

I see it as a good way to build up extra holiday for emergencies, and especially as my first year was quite busy it was easy to not take holiday, I was happy to lose it either way.

Up to 20 days carry-over for us. We only get 20d annually.

Sad thing is, most **** here have 40d annual leave saved up ready to use, most of the year!

I tend to carry over the same number of days each year – so I always use the full annual allowance and have a buffer spare so if I have an emergency near the end of the year I can eat into the extra 5 days.

Just carried five days over to next year and used them to book long weekends away in Prague, Budapest and Barcelona. Would rather do that than have a week off here in Nov/Dec.

Under those circumstances you are allowed to carry over up to four weeks unused leave to the next year

Many firms try to deny this including the one spooky b329 works for, but it is EC legislation and they have to abide by it

We had a situation where they insisted, we had a guy that took a year off on 50% pay, (when the financial meltdown happened) he buggered off to the Philippines and when he came back, he was told to stay at home for another few weeks as he had to use the leave he had accrued whilst away! He wasn’t happy as that was time he could have stayed out there surfing! (fingers crossed as he has timed his latest trip perfectly with the recent Typhoon and we haven’t heard from him yet…)