An annual leave tracker for a UK team needs to do four things: hold each person's allowance, take off the days they book, show who's away on any date, and apply the rules from the Working Time Regulations. A spreadsheet handles the first three for a small, full-time team. The fourth is where most free trackers go wrong, because the template knows nothing about part-time patterns, people who start in April, bank holidays that land on someone's day off, or what happens to unused days in January.
This guide sets out the rules your tracker has to get right (all from gov.uk and Acas, linked as we go), a spreadsheet layout that handles them, a worked example for a six-person team, and the point where a dedicated tool earns its cost.
What UK law says your tracker has to count
Most of the arithmetic comes from a short list of rules. Get these into the tracker and you have most of it.
The minimum is 5.6 weeks. Gov.uk says most workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year. For a five-day week that's 28 days. Statutory paid holiday is capped at 28 days, so someone working six days a week still gets 28.
Bank holidays can sit inside the 28. Employers don't have to give bank holidays as paid leave on top, and they can count them as part of statutory leave. If you advertise "25 days plus bank holidays", that's 33 days in England and Wales, comfortably above the minimum. There are 8 bank holidays in England and Wales in 2027; Scotland and Northern Ireland have different ones, so a team spread across the UK needs more than one list.
Part-timers get the same 5.6 weeks, pro rata. Gov.uk's own example: three days a week means at least 16.8 days (3 × 5.6).
Irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue by the hour. For leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, gov.uk's calculation page says their entitlement is 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period. Its example: 30 hours in a weekly pay period gives 3.621 hours, rounded up to 4.
Accrual can be monthly. Instead of handing over the whole year's allowance on 1 January, an employer can use an accrual system where a worker gets one-twelfth of their leave each month. The same page covers starters: under a leave-year system someone can accrue one-twelfth from their first day, or you can pro-rate their first month by days worked.
Notice runs both ways. Booking time off says a worker gives notice of at least twice the leave they want, and an employer refusing gives notice as long as the leave. Your contract can set different terms. Employers can also tell people when to take leave, such as over Christmas, with notice of at least twice the length.
Carry-over needs an agreement, with exceptions. Acas says workers can carry over some statutory leave if a relevant agreement (such as the contract) allows it; otherwise the 5.6 weeks should be taken in the leave year. The exceptions: someone on long-term sick leave can carry over up to 4 weeks, to be used within 18 months of the end of that leave year; the same 4-week cap applies if the employer didn't let them take it, didn't encourage them to, or didn't tell them they'd lose it; and leave missed through maternity or other statutory leave must be allowed to carry over.
Leave keeps building during sickness and family leave, and people can ask to take holiday during a period of sick leave. A tracker that pauses accrual when someone's off sick is wrong.
This isn't legal advice, and the guidance changes. Check the linked pages before you set your policy, and treat the rest of this article as how to record whatever policy you settle on.
Why free annual leave trackers break
The templates ranking for "annual leave tracker" are mostly a tab per month, a row per person and a dropdown of absence codes. That's a fine calendar. As a record of entitlement it has gaps, and they show up in predictable places.
One allowance for everyone. A single "Allowance" column with 33 in every row is right until you hire a part-timer, then it's wrong for one person and nobody notices until they ask why their balance is negative in October.
Bank holidays as a blanket deduction. Many sheets mark bank holidays as days off for the whole team. For someone who doesn't work Mondays, that either quietly gives them nothing for the Monday bank holidays or subtracts days they were never going to work. Either way the totals are off.
No mid-year starters. Someone joining in April gets the full year's allowance because the formula doesn't know when they started.
Hours versus days. The 12.07% rule is calculated in hours. A tracker that only knows days can't hold it.
Carry-over by hand. Every January someone copies last year's balances into a new file, decides what carries over, and overwrites the formulas.
Approval lives somewhere else. The request arrives in chat or email, gets a thumbs-up, and might reach the sheet. When two people book the same week, nobody can see it until both have booked flights.
A spreadsheet layout that gets the rules right
If you're staying on a spreadsheet, and for four or five full-timers that's reasonable, use three tabs rather than twelve.
Tab 1: People. One row per person.
| Column | Example | Why it's there |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Priya | |
| Start date | 2027-04-13 | Pro-rates a mid-year starter |
| End date | blank | Pro-rates a leaver |
| Working days | Tue, Wed, Thu | Decides which bank holidays and booked days count |
| Days per week | 3 | Pro-rata maths |
| Full-time allowance incl. bank holidays | 33 | Your policy, the same for everyone |
| Pay basis | Regular / irregular hours | Irregular hours go to the 12.07% calculation instead |
| Carried over | 2 | Entered once, with the reason |
Tab 2: Bookings. One row per booking, never per day: name, first day, last day, half day at start or end, type (annual, sick, unpaid, other), approved by, approved on. A row per booking is what lets you count working days properly and see who approved what.
Tab 3: Balances. Calculated, never typed into.
Pro-rata allowance = full-time allowance × days per week ÷ 5
Months in year = months from start (or leave-year start) to end (or leave-year end)
Allowance this year = pro-rata allowance × months in year ÷ 12
Bank holidays owed = bank holidays in the leave year that fall on this person's working days
Days to book = allowance this year − bank holidays owed + carried over
Remaining = days to book − working days in approved annual-leave bookings
The two lines that most templates leave out are "bank holidays owed" (counted against the person's own working days) and "months in year".
Keep the bank holiday list on its own small tab, copied from gov.uk/bank-holidays each year, with a column for the nation if anyone works from Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Worked example: a six-person agency in 2027
A design agency with a January–December leave year and a policy of 25 days plus bank holidays (33 days for a full-timer, England and Wales). The people are hypothetical; the bank holiday dates are 2027's from gov.uk.
| Person | Pattern | Pro-rata allowance | Bank holidays on their working days | Days they book |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sam (founder) | Mon–Fri | 33 | 8 | 25 |
| Ali | Mon–Fri | 33 | 8 | 25 |
| Jess | Mon–Fri | 33 | 8 | 25 |
| Priya | Tue–Thu | 19.8 | 1 | 18.8 |
| Tom | Mon, Wed, Fri | 19.8 | 7 | 12.8 |
| Lena | Mon–Fri, starts 13 April | 24.75 | 5 | 19.75 |
A few things to notice.
Priya and Tom both work three days and both have 19.8 days, above the statutory 16.8. But five of 2027's eight England and Wales bank holidays are Mondays and two are Fridays, so Tom gets seven of his days as bank holidays and books 12.8. Priya's only bank holiday is Tuesday 28 December, so she books 18.8. Their totals are equal, which is the point. A sheet that gives "bank holidays off" to everyone would hand Tom seven fixed days and Priya one, and still show both with the same number to book.
Lena starts on 13 April. Pro-rating by month (April to December is nine months) gives 33 × 9 ÷ 12 = 24.75 days. Five bank holidays fall after her start, so she books 19.75. Many employers round half days up in the person's favour; whatever you decide, write it in the policy and apply it the same way every time.
Now carry-over. Say your contract allows up to 5 days of contractual leave to carry into the next year and Ali ends 2027 with 7 unbooked. Five carry, two are lost, and you've told Ali in good time so the loss is fair. If Jess had spent six weeks of the autumn off sick and couldn't use her leave, the Acas rules above apply on top of your contract.
None of this is hard. It's just six people with six different answers, and a template with one formula in the Remaining column gets three of them wrong.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
The spreadsheet is free and you already know it. These are the signs it's costing you more than a tool would:
- You have part-timers, mid-year starters or people in more than one UK nation, and you're maintaining the formulas yourself.
- Requests arrive in three places and you've had a clash you only spotted after both people had booked.
- Someone other than you approves leave, and you can't see who said yes.
- You've had a balance dispute, and the answer depended on what was in a previous year's file.
- Planning work around absences means opening the leave sheet next to the project plan. (If you're doing that every week, the capacity planning guide explains why leave belongs inside the plan.)
- January is a morning of copying balances by hand.
Two or more of those and the hours you spend tidying the sheet are worth more than a leave tool costs.
What to look for in annual leave software
Whatever you pick, check it against the rules above, not against the demo.
- Working patterns per person. It should count a booking against the days that person actually works, not a generic Monday–Friday.
- Public holidays per location. Separate lists for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and for anyone abroad.
- Accrual choice. Whole allowance upfront, or monthly.
- Carry-over with a cap, applied automatically at the leave-year start.
- Half days, at the start or end of a booking.
- Approval routing to the right manager, and a record of who approved.
- A shared calendar people actually look at, ideally as a feed in their own Google, Outlook or Apple calendar.
- Adjustments with a reason. When you correct a balance, the next person should see why.
- Hours-based accrual, if you have irregular-hours or part-year workers. Many tools count only in days, so ask.
Dedicated leave apps, and where they're the better choice
If leave tracking is the only problem you have, a dedicated leave app is the simplest answer, and the UK has several good ones. Two that rank for this search, checked on their own pricing pages on 11 November 2026:
- Timetastic charges per user per month across three plans, with a free trial and no minimum term. The prices shown depend on your region, so check the page for your currency.
- Leave Dates starts at £0.75 per user per month, excluding VAT, with a 30-day trial. Its page notes that every employee you add counts towards the subscription, even if they never log in.
At those prices a six-person team pays a few pounds a month, which is hard to beat for leave on its own. Per-user pricing only starts to matter when leave is one of several tools you're paying for per head, alongside a project tool, a chat tool and a timesheet app. That's the situation in replacing Slack and ClickUp with one tool.
Where Suprwork fits
Suprwork is one workspace for running a small agency or studio: projects, team chat, check-ins, invoicing and the people side, including time off. It's priced as a flat monthly plan with everyone on the team included, so adding a part-timer doesn't change the bill.
What the time-off module does today:
- Reads the leave policy you already wrote and proposes each leave type (allowance, upfront or monthly accrual, carry-over cap, leave-year start month, half days), quoting the sentence it came from. You approve what's right.
- Counts each request in working days, using that person's working days and their public holiday calendar, with half days at either end.
- Checks the balance, sends the request to the right manager for approval, and shows everyone who's off on a team calendar, with a calendar feed for Google, Outlook or Apple.
- Lets an owner, admin or HR lead adjust a balance up or down in half days, with a written reason kept in the balance's log, which is where a part-timer's pro-rata figure or a starter's first year goes.
What it doesn't do, so you can judge the fit: public holidays are entered or copied in, not fetched for you; it counts in days and half days, so the 12.07% hourly accrual for irregular-hours workers is still a calculation you do; and it doesn't make payroll deductions. Your leave policy itself can live in Documents, next to the contract template it refers to.
If you also want leave to show up where work is planned, so you can see that someone's off before you promise a client a date, that's the reason to have it in the same place as the projects. If you only need a leave calendar, one of the apps above will do it for less.
A five-minute check on whatever you use now
Pick the most awkward person on your team: the part-timer who doesn't work Mondays, or whoever joined in the spring. Work out by hand, from the rules above, how many days they should book this leave year. Then compare it with what your tracker says. If the numbers match, your tracker is fine. If they don't, you've found the error before they did.
While you're there, check that your written policy answers the questions the rules leave to you: the leave year, whether bank holidays sit inside the allowance, how starters are pro-rated, how much contractual leave carries over, and how half days round. If it's going into a new starter's onboarding, it should be clear enough that they can check their own balance.
Sources
- Gov.uk, Holiday entitlement (checked 11 November 2026)
- Gov.uk, Calculate leave entitlement
- Gov.uk, Booking time off
- Gov.uk, UK bank holidays
- Acas, Carrying over holiday
- Timetastic, Pricing and Leave Dates, Pricing plans (both checked 11 November 2026)