The Annual Leave Record Every UK Employer Has Had to Keep Since April 2026

Most of the conversation about the Employment Rights Act 2025 is about things that have not happened yet. Guaranteed hours, reasonable notice of shifts, payment when a shift is cancelled at short notice — all of those are expected during 2027, and the dates are still to be confirmed (GOV.UK timeline).

One duty from the same Act is not in the future. It commenced on 6 April 2026, it applies to every employer in Great Britain, and breaching it is a criminal offence.

What regulation 16B says

Section 35(2) of the Act inserted a new regulation 16B into the Working Time Regulations 1998. It is short enough to quote in full (legislation.gov.uk):

An employer must keep records which are adequate to show whether the employer has complied with the entitlements conferred by regulations 13(1), 13A(1), 15B(2) and 16(1) and the requirements in regulations 14(2) and (6) and 15E(2), and retain such records for six years from the date on which they were made.

That is seven separate regulations, and they are not interchangeable:

Regulation	What the record has to show
13(1)	The basic four weeks' annual leave
13A(1)	The additional 1.6 weeks
15B(2)	Accrual for irregular-hours and part-year workers
16(1)	That the worker was actually paid for the leave
14(2) and 14(6)	Payment in lieu on termination, and how it was calculated
15E(2)	Rolled-up holiday pay, where it is used

The four weeks and the 1.6 weeks are listed separately because they behave differently — they are derived from different sources and carry over under different rules. A single "28 days taken" figure does not answer regulation 16B, because it cannot show which entitlement each day came out of.

The part employers keep missing

Regulation 16B is a records duty, not a leave duty. You can have given every worker their full entitlement and paid it correctly, and still be in breach, because you cannot show it.

The enforcement point is regulation 29, which was amended at the same time. It now reads (legislation.gov.uk):

An employer who fails to comply with any of the relevant requirements or with regulation 16B(1) shall be guilty of an offence.

An employer convicted under it is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, and on indictment to a fine. This is not a tribunal risk that a worker has to bring a claim to trigger. It is an offence.

Six years, from the date the record was made

Not six years from the leave year, and not six years from when the worker left. Six years from the date on which the record was made. A record created in June 2026 about the 2025–26 leave year has to survive until June 2032.

For adult social care in particular, that interacts with staff turnover in an uncomfortable way. The leavers are precisely the people whose payment-in-lieu calculation under regulation 14(6) is most likely to be queried, and precisely the records most likely to be lost when an account is closed down.

What "adequate" means in practice

Regulation 16B(2) is deliberately permissive about form: the records "may be created, maintained and kept in such manner and format as the employer reasonably thinks fit". There is no prescribed template and no portal to file anything with.

That permissiveness is easy to misread as leniency. It is not — it moves the burden. Because no format is mandated, no format is a defence either. The only question that matters is whether what you kept is adequate to show the seven things above. A spreadsheet can be adequate. A spreadsheet that records days taken but not what each day was paid, or that was rebuilt from memory after the fact, is not.

Three tests are worth applying to whatever you already keep:

1. Can it distinguish the four weeks from the 1.6? If not, it cannot evidence 13(1) and 13A(1) separately.
2. Can it show the pay calculation, not just the amount? Regulation 14(6) is about how the payment was calculated. A number with no working is an assertion.
3. Would it still be readable in 2032, by someone who was not there? Six years is longer than most payroll systems, most staffing agencies, and most employment relationships.

Where this sits relative to 2027

It is worth being precise about the sequencing, because a lot of published commentary is not.

• Already in force: the holiday record-keeping duty above, day-one paternity and parental leave, and statutory sick pay from the first day of absence (all from 6 April 2026).
• 1 October 2026: the employment tribunal claim window doubles from three months to six (GOV.UK). That widens the period over which contemporaneous records may still matter.
• 30 October 2026: trade union access rights and the strengthened harassment-prevention duties commence. These are not rota duties, and copy that implies otherwise is wrong.
• Expected during 2027, dates to be confirmed: guaranteed hours, reasonable notice of shifts and changes, and payment for shifts cancelled or curtailed at short notice (Acas). Thresholds and reference periods are to be set in regulations and were still subject to consultation as at the date of this article.

The practical consequence is that the records discipline arrives first and the rota rights arrive later. An organisation that gets its leave records in order this year is not preparing for 2027 — it is meeting a duty that already applies, and happening to build the habit the 2027 rights will need.

How we handle it

Toi 'n' Moi® Rota Management produces a regulation 16B record that composes the underlying figures rather than recalculating them, so the record cannot silently disagree with the holiday pay calculation it cites. Records are append-only: a correction is a new record that names and supersedes the old one, and both survive, because a six-year retention rule is meaningless if the history can be quietly overwritten. Where the underlying data is genuinely missing, the record shows the gap instead of filling it.

You can read what the software does and does not claim on the Rota Management site.

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This article is general information about employment legislation, not legal advice. Every legal claim above links to the primary source and was checked against it on 7 September 2026; guidance and regulations change. Toi 'n' Moi® Rota Management records what you scheduled, offered, changed and cancelled, which may support your compliance evidence. It does not by itself make an employer compliant, and it is not a substitute for advice on your own circumstances from a qualified employment-law adviser.