# Workplace Surgery Q3: Bank holiday leave with compressed hours

- **Episode:** [216](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/216.md) (2025-07-22)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** bank-holiday, compressed-hours, leave-policy
- **Time:** 50:05–52:41 (start 3005s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/216?t=3005](https://truthliesandwork.com/216?t=3005)

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[50:05] Al Elliott: Absolutely. Thank you, Liam. Liam Reid from Curve. Okay, so question number 3, how does bank holiday leave work if you do compressed hours? Oh, this is a great question. And what I like about this is that I think if I'd asked you that, You would've gone, oh, oh, oh. So, my wife's returning from maternity leave and working compressed hours, basically 5 days over 4. We understand how that affects her regular leave, but what about bank holidays? Now, what we're talking about bank holidays, just in case you've never heard of it, bank holidays are a UK thing. It's usually a Monday and you get like 6 days
[50:39] Leanne Elliott: Public holiday
[50:40] Al Elliott: Public holiday is what we're talking about. You might have Memorial Day across the pond. She's entitled to the usual 8 days of bank holiday, But now she won't be working Mondays, and a lot of bank holidays fall on Mondays. Does she just lose them? I am so pleased we're not answering this. I don't think I even understand the question. Okay, so once again, we're going to go over to Catherine Coggins, who's the Head of Internal HR and Legal at The Curve Group, because let's be honest, we've got no idea
[51:04] Leanne Elliott: This very much depends on what is contained in the contract of employment, so specifically around bank holidays, public holidays. So I'd recommend speaking to your HR department. A fair way to calculate holiday is to convert the full-time entitlement, including bank holidays, into hours, and then any time needed to cover bank holidays is deducted from this. This would then leave you with a proportion of bank holiday entitlement left to use as and when, but one definitely to speak to your HR department about
[51:29] Al Elliott: I understand what Katherine said. I still wouldn't have a clue how to do it. It sounds to me like you need a spreadsheet and a bit of ChatGPT thrown in there, or possibly just Katherine from the Curve Group. I don't know
[51:39] Leanne Elliott: I think Katherine from the Co-Group is the best option here, Al
[51:41] Al Elliott: Actually, that's a good point. Go to Katherine or someone like Katherine, uh, to, to go and get that advice. Don't use the things I talked about with spreadsheets and ChatGPT. That's not gonna work. Leigh, what would work?
[51:50] Leanne Elliott: Do you know what? It never even crossed my mind until actually when we were talking to Jeanette on the show and she said about how they convert days into hours. And I was like, well, that makes loads more sense. Mm-hmm. Because that gives you much more flexibility. Um, so yeah, but it's clever HR people like that, isn't it, that figure out figure out the processes to implement the things that, that, yeah, that we know psychologically and from the research is really positive for the employee experience. So, yeah, thank you so much to Katherine and Liam and everyone at The Curve Group who helped to put that together. Sam, special shout out to you. Thank you very much. Yeah, if you enjoyed that, let us know and we'll include some more HR-based questions in the future. If you have an HR-based question, send it in and we'll get it answered by a member of the team at The Curve Group. As always, I'll leave links to the Curve Group in the show notes, should you want to get in touch and ask about working out that holiday allowance that Al and I still can't quite wrap our head around