Duty to keep holiday records: key considerations for the higher education sector
From 6 April 2026, UK employers have been subject to a specific statutory duty to keep adequate records demonstrating compliance with their obligations relating to annual leave and holiday pay. Failure to do so may constitute a criminal offence. The new obligation came as something of a surprise, with only a week’s warning in advance of the change in the law.
What is the duty?
The Employment Rights Act 2025 inserted a new requirement into the Working Time Regulations 1998 (WTR) requiring employers to keep adequate records of statutory annual leave and holiday pay. The new duty requires employers to maintain records sufficient to demonstrate compliance with:
- statutory annual leave entitlement;
- holiday pay requirements; and
- payments in lieu of untaken statutory leave on termination.
Records must be retained for six years from the date they are made.
What constitutes an ‘adequate’ record?
The legislation does not prescribe a particular format for records, so employers may keep records in any way they see fit, which may include manual records, or records kept through an HR system.
The legislation also does not prescribe the precise matters that should be recorded but, in order to be able to demonstrate compliance, it is likely that the following will need to be documented:
- each worker’s annual leave entitlement;
- the method of accrual, including whether the worker is categorised as a part-year or irregular hours worker;
- dates and amounts of leave taken;
- leave carried over between holiday years;
- details of holiday pay paid and which elements of remuneration were included in holiday pay calculations; and
- details of payments in lieu of leave on termination.
Challenges in the higher education sector
For many employers, these obligations will present no difficulties and they may already have in place systems that keep the relevant records for them. The higher education sector, however, must contend with two particular challenges from a holiday pay compliance perspective.
Multiple sources of pay
Academic staff may receive remuneration from a variety of sources, including:
- salaried payments;
- additional teaching payments;
- examination fees;
- honoraria; and
- additional duties payments.
It is also not unusual to find academics employed or engaged under more than one contract. They may, for example, have a salaried position as an employee in one university department, but carry out ad hoc teaching under a casual worker contract in another. This may be further complicated by the worker being properly classified as an irregular hours or part-year worker for part of the work they carry out, meaning that the method of accrual of leave and the payment of holiday pay could vary according to the work they are carrying out. This can make keeping track of holiday entitlements and payments even more difficult, and lead to difficulties in establishing what amounts to a ‘week’s pay’ for holiday pay purposes.
Holiday bookings
A particular challenge for higher education institutions is the fact that many academic staff do not formally book or record annual leave at all. This is often simply because the academic workload is not linear in nature and may fluctuate across the academic year, with holiday periods notionally seen as periods of leave, but potentially simply involving a reduction in work rather than a complete break. Academic staff are also often viewed as autonomous and in charge of managing their own working time, and are therefore also trusted to take holiday without the need to formally record it. While such arrangements may be normal, they are difficult to reconcile with the new statutory record-keeping requirements.
The legal difficulty is obvious. From 6 April 2026, employers must keep records demonstrating compliance with statutory annual leave and holiday pay obligations, including records of holiday taken. An institution that cannot demonstrate when an employee took annual leave may struggle to establish compliance with the Working Time Regulations.
If no reliable leave records exist, not only will there be issues in complying with record-keeping obligations, institutions will also face difficulties in responding to holiday pay litigation, whether that relates to the amount of leave taken, or payments due in respect of leave. In the absence of contemporaneous records, determining an individual’s true leave position may become highly problematic, particularly where the employment relationship has continued for many years.
Practical steps for higher education institutions
Higher education providers should consider requiring all staff, including academic employees, to record annual leave through a centralised system. While such a requirement may represent a cultural shift in some institutions, it is likely to provide the clearest evidence of compliance.
The introduction of the new statutory record-keeping duty may therefore act as a catalyst for higher education institutions to revisit traditional approaches to academic leave management. Systems that rely on informal understandings or assumptions about leave-taking are likely to become increasingly difficult to justify where employers bear the burden of demonstrating compliance through adequate records.
Universities that can demonstrate clear, accurate and accessible records will be best placed to defend holiday pay claims, satisfy regulatory scrutiny, and ensure compliance.
Further steps that universities should take include:
- requiring staff where practicable to take leave on certain days;
- regularly reminding staff to use their holiday before the end of the holiday year, and the consequences of not taking leave, to help to prompt a culture of booking holiday and avoiding leave being carried over;
- training HR, payroll and departmental managers on record-keeping requirements;
- ensuring that payroll systems can identify which elements should be reflected in holiday pay calculations and retain evidence supporting those calculations – the greater the complexity of remuneration, the greater the need for comprehensive audit trails;
- auditing casual worker arrangements to ensure that accrual and payment methods are correct for all workers;
- implementing six-year retention policies for holiday records.