How many bank holidays do employees living in Scotland get?

There are nine bank holidays for people living in Scotland per year.

If your employees live in Scotland, they’ll normally get nine bank holidays a year, whereas England and Wales get eight and Northern Ireland gets ten.

Bank holidays in Scotland in 2024

There are nine bank holidays in Scotland in 2024.

These are:

How does this impact annual leave?

As a statutory minimum amount, full-time employee should receive 28 days holiday a year. This includes the nine bank holidays (also known as public holidays), which means in Scotland they should receive a minimum of 19 additional days of annual leave. Please note you can’t give full-time employees less than 28 days total leave in the UK – that’s illegal.

What happens if the employee works on bank holidays?

If your company doesn’t take bank holidays off, and therefore your employee works on bank holidays, they’re still entitled to a minimum of 28 days off overall – or more if that’s written into their contract. They should be able to choose when to take the 28+ days leave off. And likewise, if they’re working on some bank holidays and not others, you deduct any non-working bank holiday day from the total amount of annual leave they’ve got left to use.

How many bank holidays do part-timers get in Scotland?

Holiday allowance is pro-rata, so part-time workers are due a proportional amount of what their full-time colleagues receive.

Usually part-time workers will miss a few bank holidays due to their working schedule. But this doesn’t mean they get less annual leave than their colleagues who work the same number of hours. They’re still entitled to the same amount of time off, it’s just that they’ll have to take that time off instead of having it automatically as a bank holiday.

We advise against separating leave into bank holidays and other leave as this often leads to miscalculations, particularly for part-time employees. How many days you need to allocate for bank holidays may change from year to year due to the Christmas bank holidays falling on different working days, etc. We therefore advice to give the full entitlement to employees and then inform them that if a bank holiday falls on their normal working day they must use one of their holidays on this day.

Previous bank holiday dates

Bank holidays for Scotland in 2023

In 2023, there was an extra bank holiday due to the coronation of King Charles. The bank holidays for Scotland were:

Bank holidays for Scotland in 2022

In 2022, the British public including Scotland received two extra bank holiday days, which is a rare occurrence. This was due to the national celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in summer, and then a day to reflect and mourn her passing on the day of her funeral on 19th September. This meant that Scotland had 11 bank holidays in total in 2022.

Further reading

Read this blog to understand how many bank holidays are in England and Wales and Northern Ireland.

To calculate part-time holiday entitlement for employees in Scotland use our calculator.