Under the provisions of the Holidays Act 2003 an Employee is entitled to 4 weeks paid holidays after being with the same Employer for 12 months continuously.
Continuous employment also includes all periods when the Employee is not at work but are still employed, such as if they are away on ACC. When this is the case to calculate their annual holiday pay, their total gross earnings for the last 52 weeks are divided by 52 to ascertain their weekly entitlement.
However, where an Employee has taken unpaid leave for more than one week then the anniversary of employment is extended by adding to the original date the number of days in excess of the first week of unpaid leave.
Also where for the purposes calculating the 12 months service period an Employer and Employee can agree that any period of unpaid leave of more than 1 week is to be included in the Employee’s 12 months of continuous employment, the divisor of 52 to be used for the purposes of calculating the Employee’s average weekly earnings must be reduced by the number of whole or part weeks greater than 1 week that the Employee was on the unpaid leave.
For an in-depth look at this and Holidays in general see the Annual Holidays and Leave ebook which
Employer Support Package subscribers can download from the Library tab of the Employers Toolbox [
www.EmployersToolbox.co.nz ].
It is available for non members to purchase from the following link - "
Annual Holidays and Leave".