Great Britain
This duty sits in the Working Time Regulations 1998, which cover England, Wales and Scotland. Northern Ireland has its own working time regulations — if your venue is there, check the position locally rather than assuming this applies.
Since 6 April 2026 you have had to keep records adequate to show that your staff got the holiday they were entitled to and were paid properly for it — and you have to keep those records for six years from the day each one was made.
That is the whole duty, and the duty itself is settled — it is in force, and nothing about it is waiting on further legislation. What is still being worked out is how it will be enforced, which is the second half of this post. It reaches a venue of four as readily as one of forty, and it covers casuals and variable-hours staff exactly as it covers a salaried head chef.
What the law actually says
The Employment Rights Act 2025 added a new regulation 16B to the Working Time Regulations 1998. It runs to two sentences.
Quoted
Regulation 16B, Working Time Regulations 1998
An employer must keep records which are adequate to show whether the employer has complied with the annual leave entitlements and payment requirements listed below, and must retain those records for six years from the date on which they were made. The records may be created, maintained and kept in such manner and format as the employer reasonably thinks fit.
The list it points at is what makes this more than a filing rule. Six separate obligations have to be evidenced, and three of them only bite on the kind of staff a pub actually has.
Notice what “adequate to show” does. It is not a list of forms to fill in — the format is explicitly yours to choose. It is a standard you have to meet: at any point in the next six years, could you put something in front of somebody that settles whether a given person’s holiday and holiday pay were right?
Six years from when, exactly
This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth being pedantic about.
Ask the internet how long an employer keeps staff records and you will be told six years after employment ends. That is a real answer to a different question. It is a rule of thumb about how long somebody might still bring a claim, not a statutory duty to retain anything — and it is not this duty.
Regulation 16B does work as a duty, and its clock runs from the date the record was made, not from the date somebody leaves.
The practical difference
A glass collector works six shifts in October 2026 and never comes back. Under the leaver rule you might expect their file to go in 2033, six years after they left. Under regulation 16B, the October 2026 record has its own clock and has to survive until October 2032 — whether they lasted six shifts or six years.
In a venue with turnover this is the harder of the two rules. The regulation does not dictate how often you write anything down, but the moment a record exists it starts its own six years — so a system that produces something every pay period is running many clocks rather than one per person.
The bit that is genuinely hard in a pub
If everyone were on fixed hours this would be a non-event. Fifteen staff, 5.6 weeks each, a spreadsheet of days taken, done.
Hospitality is not that. A fifteen-person pub usually has a handful of contracted staff and a bank of everybody else — and for that second group, holiday is accrued rather than allocated. Their entitlement is an arithmetic result rather than a number in a contract, and the arithmetic is only ever as good as the record of hours underneath it.
Two shapes of staff are caught, and the second one surprises people.
Definition
Who accrues, rather than being allocated
An irregular hours worker is someone whose paid hours in each pay period are, under their contract, wholly or mostly variable. Your casuals.
A part-year worker is someone contracted to work only part of the year, with periods of at least a week in it that they are neither required to work nor paid for. Their hours do not have to vary at all. A term-time-only kitchen porter on the same fixed shifts every week they work is a part-year worker, and accrues exactly like a casual.
Both build up 12.07% of the hours they actually work, capped at 28 days a leave year. But the calculation is not an annual one, and this is where a shortcut goes wrong. The regulation does the sum on the last day of each pay period, on that period’s hours, and rounds the answer there and then: a leftover fraction under 30 minutes counts as nothing, and 30 minutes or more counts as a whole hour.
Rounding once a period, rather than once a year, moves the answer a long way.
Take a week off the shift and it swings the other way: at 12 hours the fraction is 27 minutes, rounds to nothing, and the year lands at 52 hours against an annual shortcut of 75.3. Real weeks are not identical either, which is the actual point — there is no way to reach the legal figure from an annual total. You get it by holding the hours for every pay period, which is precisely the record regulation 16B is asking about.
Paying rolled-up holiday pay does not reduce any of this. The 12.07% uplift added to each pay run, allowed for irregular-hours and part-year staff for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, changes what the evidence looks like rather than how much of it you need: the uplift has to appear as its own amount on the payslip, so the payslip becomes part of the record — and you still need the hours it was worked out from.
Acas is specific about what to hold: holiday taken, holiday carried over from previous years, holiday pay, and any payment in lieu of holiday when somebody leaves. For holiday pay it adds that you should be able to show the component parts — bonuses or commission that went into the calculation, not just the total that reached the bank.
Why this landed now: enforcement arrives in 2027
The record-keeping duty is not a tidy-up. It is the foundation for something else.
Statutory holiday pay is enforced one way at the moment: a member of staff takes a claim to an employment tribunal. From 2027 the government intends the Fair Work Agency to enforce it directly instead.
That is the same Agency that now holds responsibility for the minimum wage — though the minimum wage work is still being done by HMRC, under contract, with HMRC’s team due to move into the Agency in April 2027. Which tells you what holiday pay enforcement will probably feel like, because the machinery being proposed for it is the machinery already used there: an inspection, a Notice of Underpayment, and a penalty on top of the arrears.
The detail is not settled. The government put its proposed approach out to consultation on 30 June 2026, and everything in the box below is a proposal rather than a rule you can plan against yet.
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on 22 September 2026
What is proposed, and worth knowing now:
A six-year look-back. The Agency would investigate holiday pay up to six years into the past — deliberately matched to the six years you now keep records for. That six years is a ceiling set by the Act itself rather than a proposal, and underpayments from before Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 fall outside it altogether.
Minimum-wage-grade penalties. 200% of the arrears owed, capped at £20,000 per worker and floored at £100.
Half of that if you pay quickly. The penalty would count as settled in full if the arrears and half the penalty are paid within 14 days — so 200% becomes an effective 100%.
And nothing at all if you get there first. A notice would not ordinarily be issued where an employer has already repaid all the arrears owing before an investigation starts. Checking your own figures is worth more than it looks.
The government says the approach will be supportive, that guidance will be published before enforcement begins, and that businesses will not be expected to change overnight.
Put the two dates next to each other and the shape is obvious. The records duty started in April 2026; enforcement is intended for 2027, looking back over the years you are now required to have records for. The records you are keeping today are the ones that will be asked for.
What happens if you cannot produce them
Failing to comply with regulation 16B(1) is a criminal offence under regulation 29 of the same regulations — a fine at the statutory maximum on summary conviction, and an unlimited fine on conviction on indictment. The 2025 Act also added a specific power for the Secretary of State to bring those proceedings in England and Wales, which tells you it was not written to be decorative.
Realistically, prosecution is not the risk a fifteen-person pub should plan around. The risk is quieter than that. If somebody says they were underpaid holiday three years ago and you cannot show what they accrued, what they took, or what you paid them for it, you are arguing from memory against a written complaint. Records are what turn that from a negotiation into a fact.
The retention periods do not match, and that is the trap
Three separate duties now sit on the same staff, with three different clocks.
The two six-year duties do not start on quite the same day, and what each of them wants you to prove is not identical either. What they share is the fact underneath: who worked which hours, and what they were paid for them. Something that can answer that goes a long way towards both. Something that cannot answer it is no use to either.
What this means for how you keep the rota
Start from what the law does not say. It does not require software, it does not require a particular system, and it does not rule out paper — the format is expressly whatever you reasonably think fit, and Acas is equally relaxed about it. The only test is whether what you hold is adequate to show the thing was done right.
So the question is not whether a wall planner is allowed. It is whether that planner answers the question. Most do not: a planner records an intention rather than what happened, it is not tied to what anybody was paid, and it rarely survives a redecoration, let alone six years. A rota sent to a group chat has the same problem with a shorter life — the message history is the only copy and it belongs to whoever owns the phone. Neither is unlawful. Both are just difficult to produce from in 2032.
That is not a judgement about how well a venue is run; plenty of very good pubs work exactly this way. It is a question about what the evidence has to be able to do six years from now, and it is worth asking of whatever you use today:
- Can you show hours worked per pay period, per person, going back? Nothing else reproduces the accrual for irregular-hours and part-year staff, because the regulation calculates it a pay period at a time.
- Can you show holiday taken, holiday carried over and holiday paid as separate numbers? A single running balance loses the working, and the working is what makes a record adequate rather than merely present.
- Would any of it survive somebody leaving, a phone being replaced, or the leave year turning over? Six years is two or three staff generations in hospitality.
If the answer to any of those is no, the fix is not more paperwork. It is keeping the rota somewhere that produces the record as a by-product of running the venue, so the six years look after themselves.
Start with one person. The holiday calculator will do the 12.07% arithmetic in about a minute, and it is a fair test of whether the figures you are already keeping stand up.