UK National Holidays - are we getting a bad deal?

posted at 18:11:03
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

There was no post from me yesterday as it was a Bank Holiday here in the UK, which got me to thinking - how do we fare in terms of holidays compared to the rest of Europe/The World?

I was all prepared to say how hard-done-by we are but the research I did was quite enlightening. The main problem is sifting through all of the available information on the Internet to find the relevant stuff!

Please note that the following table is based on the data that I found and chose to use. There is actually quite a big discrepancy is the data available - not in terms of holidays allowed/given, but in terms of how long we work.

I've written before that we Brits often get a bum deal at work, and some of the studies I've found prove this - others say that we do as little as 34.5 hours a week! I don't know how there can be a difference of 14 hours, but I guess it depends on the data that you've got available and the type of workforce you're looking into.

Anyway, the chart below details working hours and National Holidays - it doesn't include any reference to paid holidays that you may be entitled to. For instance, I get 26 paid days leave a year with my current job (4 of those need to be kept for the Christmas period), in my last job I think I had 18!

The most surprising/annoying thing is the difference of holiday allowance within the UK itself. I've split England/Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland out to illustrate this. So you can see below that Scotland gets one extra day and Northern Ireland have two. That's not fair!

I've ordered the table by working hours rather than holidays as I was trying to see if the number of public holidays correspondeded with hours worked but, er, it didn't!

So, what do you think? Do we have enough holidays? Not Enough, or too many? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. I'd be interested to hear from my readers how many National Holidays you actually get per year.

Holidays/Working Hours

Country	Public Holidays	Average Working Hours/Year
USA	11	1804
Japan	15	1775
Spain	9 ***	1769
Australia	10	1730
Canada	15 **	1737
Portugal	14	1685
England / Wales	8 Days	1672*
Scotland	9 days	1672 *
Northern Ireland	10 days	1672 *
Switzerland	18 **	1659
Rep. Of Ireland	9 Days	1638
France	13 days	1546
Sweden	13	1587
Germany	9-13 **	1437

* Data Can't be split from data set used, plase see the UK Working hours spreadsheet for England/Wales/Scotland/Northern Ireland split.
** Dependant on region
*** Plus regional holidays

Sources Cited

Holidays List - Wikipedia

UK Working Hours - Office of National Statistics (2003)

Working Hours Data taken from Swivel.com (2005 Data)