UK Holiday & Holiday Pay Record-Keeping: How Chronicle Helps You Stay Compliant

Applies to UK customers · Effective 6 April 2026

What’s changed

From 6 April 2026, updated UK employment legislation introduced clearer employer obligations around retaining adequate records relating to annual leave and holiday pay.

Employers must now ensure they can demonstrate compliance with statutory holiday entitlement and holiday pay requirements through accurate, accessible and sufficiently detailed records retained for a minimum of six years.

For many employers, this goes beyond simply storing holiday balances. Employers must keep records detailed enough to demonstrate:

How employers accrued holiday entitlement
When employees took leave
How employers calculated holiday pay
When employers made payments
How employers handled unused entitlement
When employment ended

This is particularly important for organisations with:

Irregular-hours workers
Shift workers
Overtime-based earnings
Commission or bonus-based pay
Multiple worker categories and entitlement rules

What the law requires you to record

You must keep records adequate to show compliance with:

The worker’s statutory right to annual leave (5.6 weeks per leave year for most workers)
The worker’s right to receive the correct holiday pay, including relevant variable pay elements where applicable
The requirement to make payment in lieu of untaken statutory leave when employment ends

In practice, employers should be able to evidence:

Holiday entitlement and accrual
Leave requests and approvals
Leave taken by each worker
Carried-over leave balances
Holiday pay calculations and supporting pay elements
Payments made during leave periods
Payments in lieu of untaken leave on termination

How Chronicle supports your record-keeping obligations

Requirement	Covered by Chronicle
Leave taken by each worker	✅
Leave carried over between leave years	✅
Holiday entitlement and balances	✅
Leave approvals and historical audit trail	✅
Holiday pay paid, including calculation records	✅
Attendance and working-time history supporting calculations	✅
Payments in lieu of holiday on termination	✅ When using Chronicle Payroll
Historical reporting and data export for audits or inspections	✅

Where payroll is processed outside Chronicle, employers must therefore ensure that equivalent payroll and holiday pay records are retained within their payroll provider or payroll system.

Record retention and GDPR

Records must be retained for at least six years from the date they are created and handled in accordance with UK GDPR and applicable data protection requirements.

Chronicle retains leave, attendance and related workforce records for seven years as part of our GDPR-aligned data lifecycle policy — exceeding the current statutory minimum retention period.

Chronicle also provides:

Secure cloud-based record storage
Role-based access controls
Historical audit visibility
Reporting and export functionality for inspections, audits or internal reviews

Configuration matters

Holding the data is only part of the requirement.

The legislation requires organisations to maintain adequate records to demonstrate compliance, and their adequacy depends on how you configure your Chronicle environment for your workforce, contracts, and policies.

For example: