Bank holiday pay for shift workers

There is no legal right to extra pay for working a bank holiday: what it pays, and whether you get a day in lieu, is your contract. Muster claims it that way.

The rule

Gov.uk's holiday entitlement page says bank or public holidays do not have to be given as paid leave, and an employer can choose to include them as part of a worker's statutory annual leave. So for a shift worker, whose rota does not stop for a Monday, the questions are the contract's:

Is a bank holiday a working day for you, or a day off?
If you work it, is it paid at a premium, given back as a day in lieu, or both?
If your rota gives you the day off anyway, does it come out of your leave?

Nothing on the timesheet settles those. What a timesheet can do is record the hours of a worked bank holiday so that nobody has to remember afterwards which Monday it was.

How Muster does it

Muster knows the bank holidays and records a worked one with no tag to add or forget. Which column the hours go in is a setting, and it ships with the split many agreements use:

The normal day for that weekday is claimed at plain rate, and counts toward the week like an ordinary day, so the rest of the week is paid as if the bank holiday had been a normal Monday.
Hours past the normal day go in the double-time column and stay out of the week.
A day in lieu is reported as owed, never written to the timesheet, because lieu goes through your employer's own HR system.

Switch the lieu rule off and every hour of a worked bank holiday goes in the bank holiday column chosen in Settings, none of it enters the week, and no day is owed. The setting is the lieu switch; the reasons are under Bank holidays in the manual.

The app and the timesheet it sends always name the column, such as Bank Hol, never a multiple. What a column pays is your employer's to say in writing.

A worked example

A shift worker whose normal day is 8.5 hours works 11 hours on a bank holiday Monday, then four ordinary days.

With the lieu switch	The bank holiday claims	The week
On, as shipped	8.5 hours at plain rate, 2.5 in the double-time column, a day owed	8.5 of the 11 count toward the 39
Off	11 hours in the bank holiday column	None of the 11 count toward the 39

A bank holiday not worked adds nothing to the week: no contracted hours are assumed for it. Try it in the demo and read Reports, which names the column each hour went in.

Questions people ask

I work part-time shifts. Do I still get bank holidays?

Your leave is at least 5.6 weeks a year in proportion to your days, and gov.uk says an employer can include bank holidays in that. Whether a given bank holiday is a day off or a working day for you is the rota and the contract. Muster records what you worked; it does not hold your leave balance.

Does working a bank holiday push the rest of my week into overtime?

Under Muster's shipped rule, the normal day counts toward the weekly threshold, so a 39-hour week that includes a worked bank holiday is paid as a 39-hour week, and the hours past the normal day are claimed on their own. Counted is not paid twice: none of the week's time and a half lands on the bank holiday.

Who decides the rule in Muster?

Whoever runs your Muster sets the agreement for everyone, and HR can record a difference for one person. Every change is in the audit log with what it was before.

Try the demo - invented data, no account. Request a demo to use it for real. The manual has every screen.