NHS annual leave calculator — entitlement in hours, four nations

Your annual leave entitlement

England · 0 years' reckonable service
A full leave year, before anything taken, carried over, bought or sold

Total entitlement

262.5 hours

35 of your own working days · 27 + 8 days at full time

21.88 shifts of 12 hours. Working longer shifts does not buy more time off — paragraph 13.5 converts everyone's entitlement to hours precisely so that it cannot.

How that is worked out
What	Days	Day length	Your share	Hours
Annual leave	27 days	× 7.5h	full time	202.5h
Public holidays	8 days	× 7.5h	full time	60h
Total				262.5h

Your own working day is 7.5 hours — 37.5 over five. That is what booking "a day" costs you.
At 5 years' reckonable service this rises to 29 days. Reckonable service under Section 12 usually includes NHS service with previous employers, not just time with your current one.

Your employer may call this your holiday allowance or your annual leave allowance; the handbook calls it entitlement. They are the same thing, and the same figures apply.

What the four nations actually get

The same table in the handbook, and four different answers. Two of the three differences live in prose rather than in the table, which is why they are so often published wrong.

Nation	Annual leave	Public holidays	Working day	Total on appointment
England	27 days	8 days	7.5h	262.5h
Wales	28 days	8 days	7.5h	270h
Scotland	27 days	8 days	7.2h	252h
Northern Ireland	27 days	10 days	7.5h	277.5h

Total is annual leave plus public holidays, converted at that nation's own working day. The spread between Scotland and Northern Ireland is 25.5 hours — over three working days a year.

Why Northern Ireland is two days ahead

Table 6 gives everyone eight general public holidays. Paragraph 13.3 then says that in Northern Ireland the entitlement "contains the two extra statutory days, however there are ten general public holidays" — the two being St Patrick's Day and the Twelfth of July. The number is in a sentence about extra-statutory days rather than in the table, so a reader who takes the table at face value is short by two days a year, every year.

Why Wales is only ahead at the start

Paragraph 13.1.1 gives NHS Wales staff one additional day on appointment, from the 2021/2022 leave year. It applies to that tier alone: at five years' service Wales and England are identical at 29 days, and at ten both are 33. Adding a day to every tier — which is the obvious mistake — overstates leave for most Welsh staff.

Why Scotland's day is shorter

The handbook's own worked example converts eight public holidays to "60 hours (8×7.5 hours)". That 7.5 is a 37.5-hour week over five days, which is England, Wales and Northern Ireland. NHS Scotland moved to a 36-hour week on 1 April 2026, making a Scottish working day 7.2 hours. Scottish staff get the same number of days and fewer hours — and a calculator that used 7.5 for everyone would credit them about four per cent too much.

If you work part time

Annual leave scales straight down with your hours. Public holidays do not, quite: paragraph 13.6 gives part-time staff "no less than pro-rata ... rounded up to the nearest half day", so the fraction is rounded in your favour before it is converted to hours.

Paragraph 13.7 then adds that entitlement to your annual leave. Part-time staff do not get public holidays off as such — you book the ones you would have worked as leave, out of a balance that already includes them.

What this does not cover

A full leave year's entitlement, before anything taken, carried over, bought or sold. It does not handle starting or leaving mid-year, purchased leave, or local agreements that consolidate public holidays into annual leave — paragraph 13.2 makes that expressly a local matter, so your employer's own scheme governs it. Pay during leave is a different question: 13.9 includes regularly paid supplements, unsocial hours and high cost area supplements, and that is handled by the take-home calculator.

An estimate from the published handbook, not a statement of your employer's records. Check it against your roster system and ask them if the two disagree by more than rounding.