Summer Holiday Resentment: Why Is Everyone Off Work Except Me?

Your holiday policy is not tested in January. It’s tested in August.

Every August, many small employers find themselves facing the same familiar squeeze: some of the team are away enjoying a much-needed break, while those still at work are left trying to keep things moving and absorb the extra pressure. It can feel unfair, exhausting and a little messy. Before long, frustration starts to simmer. One person gets the fortnight they had been looking forward to, another is left disappointed, and what once seemed like a simple holiday policy can suddenly feel like the thing everyone is quietly judging.

Managing annual leave can look simple on paper, but for small businesses it is often one of those everyday HR issues that carries more emotion than expected. Holidays matter to people. They are family time, recovery time, something to look forward to, and sometimes the only proper pause in a busy year. So when several people want the same dates, cover is tight, or expectations are unclear, even a routine request can quickly become sensitive. This guide is here to help you manage holiday requests fairly, deal with clashes calmly, avoid common entitlement mistakes, and understand the risks of cancelling leave once it has been approved.

The reassuring news is that most holiday problems become much easier to handle once the rules are clear, written down and applied consistently. The difficulty is not usually the law itself; it is the uncertainty that creeps in when nobody is quite sure who decides, what criteria should be used, or how competing requests should be handled. That uncertainty can leave employees feeling overlooked and managers feeling exposed, especially when they are trying to do the right thing without a clear process to rely on.

With a clear process in place, you can reduce last-minute stress, help employees understand how decisions are made, and prevent small scheduling problems from turning into bigger workplace frustrations. A little preparation before the holiday season can protect relationships, ease the pressure on managers, and make August feel much more manageable for everyone.

Managing annual leave fairly

Being fair with annual leave does not mean saying yes to every request. It means having one clear process, applying it consistently to everyone, and only taking personal circumstances into account where the law requires you to, such as when a reasonable adjustment may be needed. We come back to that later in the blog.

ACAS, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service sets out a simple standard for handling workplace requests of this kind: base decisions on facts, not assumptions, consider requests in the order you receive them, and apply your policy consistently across the whole business. The same principle that governs flexible working requests applies just as well to holiday requests. It is not about the words in the request. It is about the process behind the decision.

That process starts with something many small businesses do not have: a written policy. If holiday requests are approved by whichever manager happens to be free that day, using whatever criteria feels reasonable in the moment, that is not a fair system. It is a set of individual judgement calls that will eventually contradict each other, and the contradiction is what builds resentment and gets challenged.

A written policy should cover how far in advance requests need to be made, who approves requests and what they are checking for, what happens when the business cannot approve every request for a given period, whether there is a limit on how many people from one team can be off at the same time, and how decisions are communicated, and how quickly.

Why the reason should not matter

One of the most common mistakes in this area is judging requests on the reason behind them. A request for a family holiday feels more sympathetic than a request with no explanation attached or a member of staff taking annual leave and staying at home, and it is tempting to let that influence the decision to say yes or no to the annual leave request. It should not. Employees are not required to justify why they want annual leave, and a system where the best-explained request wins is a system that quietly disadvantages people who are less willing or able to share personal information with their employer.

Where discrimination risk sits

This is where fairness stops being a soft skill and becomes a legal one. Under the Equality Act 2010, a pattern of refusals that disproportionately affects employees with a protected characteristic, such as disabled employees, can expose a business to discrimination claims, even if each individual refusal looks reasonable in isolation. A business that always seems to find a business reason to refuse leave requested by staff with childcare responsibilities, while approving similar requests from others, has a pattern problem, not a series of separate decisions.

The way to avoid this is not to track outcomes by protected characteristic. It is to remove discretion from the process wherever possible. If requests are decided in the order received, against a published set of business-need criteria that has nothing to do with who is asking, the pattern risk falls away because the pattern is generated by the rule, not by a manager's individual judgement.

Reasonable adjustments are the exception, not the rule

The one place personal circumstances should influence a decision is where a reasonable adjustment is genuinely required, most commonly for a disability. ACAS is clear that requests should not be prioritised based on someone's personal situation, except where a reasonable adjustment applies. That distinction matters. It is the difference between a policy that treats everyone the same and a policy that treats everyone the same except where the law specifically requires otherwise.

For example, a small employer has a team member with a disability who experiences increased fatigue during periods of flare-up. They ask to take a few days’ annual leave at short notice because they need time to recover. Ordinarily, the employer’s policy requires holiday requests to be made at least two weeks in advance and dealt with in the order they are received. However, in this situation, the employer should consider whether allowing shorter notice, or being more flexible about when the leave is taken, would be a reasonable adjustment.

This does not mean managers should start weighing up every employee’s personal circumstances. It means recognising the small number of situations where the law may require a different approach.

What good looks like in practice

A fair system rarely looks impressive from the outside. It has a published policy, a clear order of decision-making, criteria tied to business need rather than personal circumstance, and a consistent process regardless of which manager is handling the request. When employees can see the rule being applied the same way to everyone, resentment has much less to attach itself to. It is rarely the refusal that damages trust. It is the sense that someone else got a different answer to the same question.

When too many people want the same dates off

August produces this problem more than any other month. Several people want the same fortnight, the business cannot run at half capacity, and somebody has to be told no. Handled well, this is a scheduling conversation. Handled badly, it becomes the story people tell about your business for the rest of the year.

Decide the method before the conflict, not during it

The mistake most small businesses make is deciding how to resolve competing requests in the moment, under pressure, while both employees are waiting for an answer. By the time the conflict exists, any method chosen will look like it was picked to justify a particular outcome, even if it was not. The method needs to be agreed and published before the first clashing request ever arrives.

There are a few common approaches, and each has a trade-off. Date order received is simple, transparent and defensible, since it rewards planning rather than personal circumstance, though it can disadvantage employees who are naturally less organised or who had a reason to wait before asking. Rotating priority for peak periods works well where the same weeks are contested every year, such as school holiday periods, so the advantage moves around the team rather than sitting with the same person every time. Publishing minimum staffing levels in advance, and approving requests on a first-come basis within that limit, gives employees a concrete number to plan around rather than a vague sense that requests might clash.

Whichever method is chosen, write it down and apply it the same way every time. A method applied inconsistently is worse than no method at all, because it creates the appearance of favouritism even where none exists.

Talk to people before you say no

When a request cannot be approved as submitted, the conversation matters as much as the decision. Speak to your member of staff and explain the business reason clearly, reference the policy rather than presenting the decision as a personal judgement call, and offer an alternative where one exists. An employee who understands why a request was declined, and sees a genuine attempt to find another workable date, is far less likely to become resentful and escalate the issue than one who receives a flat refusal with no explanation.

Do not let different line managers make different rules

In businesses where more than one manager approves leave, inconsistency between teams is one of the fastest ways to generate resentment. If one manager runs a strict first-come-first-served system and another says yes to whoever asks nicely, employees will compare notes, and they will be right to feel something is unfair. Centralise the rule, even if approval itself stays with individual line managers. The rule needs to be the same across the business, not just within one team.

Plan ahead of the season, not during it

The businesses that handle August well are usually the ones that started thinking about it at the beginning of the year, not the ones scrambling to referee three overlapping requests in July. Ask teams to submit summer leave preferences early, publish any periods where staff can’t take holiday or staffing minimums well in advance, and resolve clashes before they become a source of tension between colleagues rather than a scheduling problem between an employee and the business.

None of this removes the disappointment of not getting the exact dates someone wanted. It does remove the sense that the decision was arbitrary, and that is usually what actually damages trust.

Holiday entitlement mistakes SMEs make

Most holiday entitlement problems are not caused by employers trying to shortchange staff. They are caused by systems that were set up informally years ago and never revisited as the business grew. These are the mistakes that come up most often.

Treating holiday entitlement as a full-time-only calculation

Every worker in the UK, not just full-time employees, is entitled to a statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave a year, which works out to 28 days (including 8 bank holidays) for someone working a standard five-day week. That entitlement applies from day one of employment, with no qualifying period, and it applies on a pro-rata basis to part-time and casual staff. A common mistake is applying a formula built for a five-day week to staff with variable hours, or assuming that casual and zero-hours workers are not entitled to paid leave at all. If someone is legally a worker, the entitlement exists regardless of what the contract calls them.

Staff starting or leaving part-way through the holiday year

Holiday calculations can feel particularly fiddly when someone starts or leaves part-way through the leave year. Rather than trying to work it out manually, the safest starting point is usually the Government’s online holiday entitlement calculator, which helps you check the correct pro-rata entitlement based on the worker’s dates and working pattern.

https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-holiday-entitlement

It is also useful for staff on zero-hours or variable-hours contracts, where entitlement often builds up in a less straightforward way across the year. Sharing the calculation with the employee can take some of the mystery out of the process, and reduce the risk of a holiday balance feeling like a guess, rather than something the business can explain confidently.

Rolled-up holiday pay is back, but only for irregular hours and part-year workers

The UK Government reintroduced rolled-up holiday pay through holiday pay reforms that took effect from 1 January 2024.  For irregular hours and part-year workers, employers can now choose to pay holiday pay as an additional amount on top of each payslip, rather than paying it when the worker actually takes holiday. This is known as rolled-up holiday pay. It must be calculated at a minimum of 12.07% of the worker’s pay for the relevant pay period, paid at the same time as their wages, and shown separately on the payslip. The important point is that this does not replace the worker’s right to take holiday. It only changes when the holiday pay is paid.

Assuming unused leave is simply lost at year end

A use it or lose it approach to statutory holiday is only lawful where the employer has actively enabled the employee to take that leave, by making the entitlement clear, encouraging its use in good time, and not creating practical barriers to booking it. The Court of Appeal's decision in Smith v Pimlico Plumbers Ltd (2022) confirmed that statutory leave does not automatically expire just because the leave year has ended.

Another tribunal case, NHS Leeds v Larner (2012), confirmed that a worker on long-term sick leave who was unable or unwilling to take annual leave because of sickness does not lose that leave at the end of the leave year. It carries over into a subsequent leave year.

Where a business has not clearly communicated entitlement and given employees a genuine opportunity to take it, unused leave can remain a live financial liability rather than something that quietly disappears when the next leave year starts.

Tracking holiday in a way nobody trusts

If you’re still using a paper-based system, Excel spreadsheets or a calendar to track annual leave, this is where most of the errors creep in. A single incorrect formula, or an accidentally deleted entry, or lost form can alter someone's holiday days before anyone notices, and paper based systems and spreadsheets give managers no easy way to see who else is already off before approving a new request. This in itself is more the root cause of the fairness and clash problems covered above. If nobody can see the full picture, decisions get made on incomplete information.

Keeping records of holiday entitlement is now a legal requirement

The Employment Rights Act 2025, inserted a new record-keeping requirement into the Working Time Regulations 1998.  This means that from 6 April 2026, employers have a legal duty to keep records demonstrating each worker's holiday entitlement, the leave they have taken, and how their holiday pay was calculated. This is a genuine shift from treating holiday records as good practice to treating them as a compliance requirement, and it is worth checking your current system against it now rather than after a query arises.

Using a cloud-based system

One of the simplest ways to take the stress out of holiday tracking is to move away from paper forms, spreadsheets and shared calendars, and use a cloud-based HR system instead. A good system gives managers and employees one clear place to check balances, request leave, approve holidays and see who else is off, which helps reduce misunderstandings before they turn into disagreements. At The HR Hero, we use BreatheHR and support many of our clients to introduce it into their business. It is easy for staff to access on their phones, and it can also help with storing employment contracts, sending documents for electronic signature, tracking sickness absence and keeping key HR and company records in one place. If you would like help choosing the right system or setting it up properly, please get in touch and we would be happy to talk you through the options.

When someone refuses to take holiday

Most holiday problems start because too many people want the same time off. Occasionally, though, the problem is the opposite: an employee never books any leave at all. They may say they are too busy, feel guilty about leaving colleagues to cover, be saving holiday for a later date, or simply have fallen into the habit of always being available. It can look helpful on the surface, but over time it can create risk for both the employee and the business.

Understand why they’re avoiding it

Paid annual leave is there for health and safety, so staff are able to rest and recover. If someone never takes it, that may be a sign they are under too much pressure, struggling to switch off, worried about workload, or unclear about whether the business actually expects them to take a break. A supportive employer should treat this as a management conversation, not an irritation. Check in with the employee, understand what is stopping them from booking time off, and make it clear that taking holiday is a normal and expected part of working life.

Know when you can require leave to be taken

Practically, this means keeping an eye on holiday balances throughout the year, not just in the final few weeks. Managers should remind staff who have not booked enough leave, encourage them to plan time off early, and deal with any workload barriers that are making holiday feel impossible. If necessary, the employer can require a worker to take holiday on particular dates, provided the correct notice is given. The usual rule is that the notice must be at least twice the length of the holiday the employer wants the worker to take, unless the employment contract or holiday policy says something different.

The legal point is important. Employers must make sure workers can take their statutory paid holiday during the leave year. A use it or lose it rule is only safe where the employer has told the worker what holiday they have, encouraged them to take it, warned them clearly that unused leave may be lost, and given them a genuine opportunity to use it. If those steps have not happened, unused statutory holiday may carry forward instead of disappearing at year end.

You cannot simply pay it instead

There is also a common misconception that an employee who refuses to take holiday can simply be paid for it instead. For statutory holiday, that is not allowed during employment. Payment in lieu of statutory annual leave is only permitted when the employment ends. During employment, the legal and practical answer is to help the employee take the leave, not to pay them to avoid it.

Build reminders into your routine

A good approach is to build holiday reminders into your normal management routine. Do not wait until the end of your leave year to discover that someone has taken only three days holiday all year. A gentle reminder in spring, a firmer conversation in summer, and a clear plan for using the remaining balance before year end will protect the employee’s wellbeing and put the business in a much stronger position if there is ever a dispute about unused holiday.

When refused holiday turns into sickness absence

Few situations test a holiday policy more than this one: an employee asks for annual leave, the request is refused for a genuine business reason, and then they go off sick on the very dates they had wanted as holiday. It can feel frustrating and, understandably, managers may wonder whether the sickness is genuine. The important thing is not to jump straight from suspicion to accusation.

Treat it as sickness absence, not suspicion

The starting point is that sickness absence and annual leave are different things. If the employee is genuinely unfit for work, the absence should be managed as sickness absence, even if the timing looks awkward. That means they should follow the normal sickness reporting process, provide any self-certification or fit note required, and be paid in line with your sick pay rules. The refused holiday should not simply be deducted from their annual leave balance unless the employee has asked to take holiday while off sick and the business has agreed.

Investigate carefully, based on evidence

That does not mean an employer has to ignore the coincidence. It does mean any concern should be handled carefully and based on evidence rather than assumption. Check whether the employee reported the absence properly, whether the reason given is consistent, whether there is a pattern of sickness after refused leave, and whether your policy allows you to request medical evidence in the circumstances. Keep the tone factual. “We need to understand the reason for your absence and make sure the correct process has been followed” is much safer than “we think you were not really sick”.

If there is evidence that the employee was not genuinely sick, for example because they told colleagues they intended to take the time off anyway, posted something inconsistent with their stated illness, or failed to follow the reporting process, the matter may become a conduct issue. Even then, it should be dealt with through the normal disciplinary process: investigate first, give the employee a chance to explain, consider the evidence fairly, and avoid making the outcome feel pre-determined.

Know the legal risks

There are also legal risks to keep in mind. Workers continue to build up holiday while they are off sick, and someone who is genuinely unwell must not be penalised simply because the timing is inconvenient. If the sickness relates to a disability, pregnancy, mental health condition or another sensitive issue, the risk of mishandling the situation increases. In those cases, take extra care before treating the absence as suspicious, and consider whether the usual absence process needs any adjustment.

Build it into your policy

A good policy will make this easier. It should explain how sickness must be reported, what evidence may be required, how sickness during or around holiday will be recorded, and what happens if there are concerns about abuse of the process. That gives managers a calm route to follow, rather than leaving them to react emotionally in the moment. The aim is not to catch people out. It is to protect the business while still treating genuine illness fairly.

Before next August arrives

A few checks are worth doing well before a holiday season starts, rather than in the middle of it.

•    Put annual leave requests and cancellation processes in writing, including notice periods and how competing requests are resolved

•    Confirm holiday entitlement and pay calculations are correct for every part-time, casual and variable-hours worker on the payroll, not just full-time staff

•    Check that annual leave records evidence entitlement, leave taken and how pay was calculated, in line with the record-keeping duty that took effect in April 2026

•    Ask managers to flag likely August clashes early, while there is still time to negotiate rather than refuse

•    Review any use it or lose it wording in the staff handbook against the current legal position on carrying over unused leave

Taken one at a time, these checks are small and manageable. Left until August, they can quickly turn into the kind of last-minute problems that create pressure, confusion and avoidable frustration.

Where to go from here

Every one of these problems traces back to the same root cause: unwritten rules or a policy that exists on paper but has never had to stand up to the pressure of peak holiday season. Written rules for how requests are handled, how clashes are resolved, and how cancellations are managed do not remove every difficult conversation, but they remove the sense of arbitrariness that turns a holiday request decision into a grievance.

If your annual leave policy has not been reviewed since it was written, or if you are relying on individual managers to make it up as they go, or you don’t know how to refuse a holiday request without upsetting staff or you’re considering implementing a cloud based tracking HR system then contact The HR Hero for a free call today:

https://www.thehrhero.co.uk/get-in-touch