Holiday Entitlements — Queen’s Platinum Jubilee 2022

To commemorate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, there will be changes to bank holidays in 2022. The late May bank holiday which normally would have fallen on Monday 30 May 2022 will be moved to Thursday 2 June 2022 and there will be an additional bank holiday on Friday 3 June 2022.

If employees have a contractual right to paid time off on bank holidays, they will be entitled to take paid time off on Thursday 2 June, rather than the usual date in late May.

Whether employees are automatically entitled to the additional bank holiday on 3 June will depend on the wording of their employment contract. As an employer, if your business requires employees to work on bank holidays, then an employee wishing to take a bank holiday as leave would simply follow the annual leave procedure to book the day off. If approved, it would be part of their holiday entitlement and they would be paid for it.

However, you may be an employer who does not require anyone to work on bank holidays. In this instance, your contracts should be worded in a way that references entitlement to the bank holidays and states that employees can book off the remaining 20 (or more) days as they choose.

If your employment contracts specify standard bank holidays then in the event of an additional bank holiday such as the Queen’s Jubilee Bank Holiday 2022, the employee would not be entitled to it.

Employers should check the wording of employees’ contracts to understand their obligations; there won’t be the automatic right to the additional day, or to time off on fixed bank holidays. Instead, employers may be able to ask employees to work on 3 June 2022 but give them the day off at a different time in the year.