If you run a cleaning business, staff absence is one of the jobs that eats your evenings. Holiday requests arrive by text, someone phones in sick at 6am, a part-timer asks how many days they have left, and you are working it out on a calculator while trying to find cover for three office cleans.
Get it wrong and it costs you twice. Underpay holiday and you are breaking the law. Overpay it and you are giving money away. And every absence you miss on the rota is a customer left with an uncleaned site.
This guide covers how UK holiday and sick leave work for cleaning teams, from statutory entitlement and the 12.07% accrual rule to part-time pro rata, carry over and sick pay. It also shows how ProCleanerUK handles each part, so the maths, the approvals and the rota all stay in one place.
The UK basics every cleaning business owner should know
Almost every worker in the UK is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year. For someone working five days a week, that is 28 days. (GOV.UK)
The key rules:
- 28 days is the statutory cap. Someone working six days a week still gets 28 days of statutory paid holiday, not more.
- Bank holidays can count towards the 28. You do not have to give them on top, but you can choose to.
- Part-timers get the same 5.6 weeks, pro rata. Someone on three days a week gets 5.6 x 3 = 16.8 days.
- Irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue it. Since April 2024 their holiday builds up at 12.07% of the hours they work each pay period. (GOV.UK)
- You can offer more than the minimum. Many cleaning companies add extra days, such as a birthday day off, to keep good staff.
Cleaning teams usually mix all of these. You might have full-time supervisors, part-time domestic cleaners on fixed days, and office cleaners whose hours change every week. One rule for everyone does not work, and that is where most spreadsheets fall apart.
Upfront or accrual: choosing how holiday is earned
ProCleanerUK supports both ways of giving holiday, and you can mix them across your team.
Upfront gives a staff member their full year’s allowance on day one. It suits fixed-hours staff on regular contracts, like a supervisor on 40 hours a week. You can use your company default (28 days unless you change it) or set a different allowance for one person.
Accrual builds holiday up as people work. It suits cleaners whose hours change week to week, or anyone on a zero-hours arrangement. Every hour worked earns a slice of holiday.
How the accrual rate is chosen
For each staff member, ProCleanerUK picks the rate in this order:
- Their own rate, if you have set Accrual on their profile with a custom rate.
- Your company default rate, from Settings > Absence Rules.
- The statutory 12.07%, if neither is set.
The rate in use is shown on the staff profile and in the staff app, so cleaners can see exactly how their holiday is earned.
Hours worked come from real work, not guesses
Accrued holiday is only as good as the hours behind it. ProCleanerUK counts hours worked using the same rules as payroll:
- time clocked in and out on jobs
- weekly pattern jobs and recurring job completions
- daily clock in and clock out
- the same caps payroll applies
So if a cleaner picks up extra shifts or overtime, their holiday goes up with it. You never have to re-key hours into a separate holiday sheet.
Example: a cleaner works 20 hours a week. At 12.07% they earn about 2.4 hours of holiday every week. If their normal day is 4 hours, that is roughly 0.6 of a day per week, and ProCleanerUK converts it into days for you using their own day length.
Part-timers, new starters and working days
This is where holiday maths usually goes wrong, so ProCleanerUK handles each case for you.
Part-time staff on fixed days
Set the days someone works on their staff profile. ProCleanerUK then pro-rates an upfront allowance against a standard five-day week.
| Days worked per week | Allowance on a 28-day company default |
|---|---|
| 5 | 28 days |
| 4 | 22.4 days |
| 3 | 16.8 days |
| 2 | 11.2 days |
Shorter working days
A cleaner on four-hour days should not burn a full eight-hour day every time they book one off. Each staff member can have their own standard day length, and their allowance and every holiday they take are worked out in their day length, not a fixed eight hours.
People who start part way through the year
If someone joins in, say, September, they get the share of the year that is left, worked out to the day rather than rounded to the month. Bank holidays are handled separately: they only get the bank holidays that fall after their start date, not ones that have already passed.
Weekends and days off are not counted
When someone books a week off, ProCleanerUK only counts the days they would normally work. A Monday to Sunday holiday for a Monday to Friday cleaner uses five days, not seven. Bank holidays inside a booked holiday are not counted twice either. Bank holiday dates come from the official England and Wales list, so you do not have to type them in each year.
Part-day absences
Not every absence is a full day. A dentist appointment from 10am to 12pm can be booked in hours, and only those hours come off the allowance and out of the rota.
Holiday pay, payroll and Xero
Holiday only matters if it ends up in the right pay packet. In ProCleanerUK, approved holiday, bank holiday and sick absences feed straight into payroll, and holiday pay syncs to Xero if you run payroll there. Nobody has to copy absences from one system to another.
The holiday earned report
For accrual staff, the question you always get asked is “how much holiday have I earned?”. The holiday earned report answers it for any date range up to a year, for every staff member at once:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Hours worked | Hours counted in the range, using the payroll rules above |
| Holiday earned | Hours of holiday built up from those hours |
| Holiday taken | Hours of holiday booked and approved in the range |
| Holiday pay value | The pay value of that holiday for the range |
It also totals the whole team, which is useful for month-end, for your accountant, and for knowing how much holiday liability you are carrying.
Sick leave and Statutory Sick Pay
Sick pay rules changed on 6 April 2026, and the changes hit cleaning businesses harder than most, because so many cleaners work short or part-time hours. (PayFit)
| Before April 2026 | From 6 April 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| When SSP starts | After 3 unpaid waiting days | From the first day off sick |
| Who qualifies | Only those earning at least £125 a week | Everyone, whatever they earn |
| How much | £118.75 a week flat rate | The lower of £123.25 a week or 80% of average weekly earnings |
| Maximum | 28 weeks | 28 weeks (unchanged) |
That means a cleaner on a few hours a week, who used to get no SSP at all, is now paid from day one.
Recording sickness in ProCleanerUK
- Log a sick day in a few taps, for a full day or just a few hours.
- It shows on the scheduler straight away, so you can see which jobs need cover.
- Sick absences feed into payroll with the rest of the period’s absences.
- The absence report tracks sickness over time, so you can spot a rising trend before it becomes a problem.
ProCleanerUK records the sickness and passes it to payroll. Always check your SSP figures against GOV.UK or your payroll provider, especially for anyone on very low hours.
Birthday leave and every other kind of absence
A birthday day off is one of the cheapest perks you can give, and cleaners remember it. ProCleanerUK has Birthday as its own absence type, so it is tracked separately and does not come out of anyone’s holiday allowance. Staff birthdays also show on the scheduler’s month view, so you can plan for them (and customer birthdays show too, in a different colour, if you like to send a card).
Every absence type has its own colour on the rota, so you can tell at a glance why someone is off:
| Type | Counts against holiday allowance | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Holiday | Yes | Booked annual leave |
| Emergency Holiday | Yes | Short-notice leave, such as a family emergency |
| Bank Holiday | Yes | Bank holidays you count within the allowance |
| Birthday | No | A birthday day off as a perk |
| Sick | No | Illness, full or part day |
| Compassionate Leave | No | Bereavement and serious family events |
| Unpaid Leave | No | Agreed time off without pay |
| Training | No | Courses and inductions |
| Meeting / Appointment | No | Part-day commitments, booked in hours |
| Unavailability | No | Regular times someone cannot work |
Regular unavailability
Some cleaners can never work certain times, for example school runs or a second job. Instead of remembering it, set it once as Unavailability: whole days each week (“never Wednesdays”), set hours on set days (“not before 9:30 on weekdays”), or permanently. It then blocks those times on the rota every week without anyone booking it again.
Carrying holiday over and adjusting balances
At year end, someone always has days left. GOV.UK says a worker on 28 days can carry over a maximum of 8 days. Where sickness stopped someone taking their leave, they can carry over more: up to 20 days for regular-hours staff, and up to 28 days for irregular-hours and part-year workers. (GOV.UK)
On the Staff Absence page, every staff member has two buttons:
- Carry Over moves unused days into the next holiday year, so they are added to next year’s balance.
- Adjust Balance adds or removes days for a given year. Use it to give a reward day, correct a mistake, or record holiday agreed before you started using ProCleanerUK.
Adjustments are saved against the year they belong to. They are included in the balance staff see in the app, so there are no side spreadsheets to keep in step.
Requests, approvals and allowance checks
No more holiday requests by text message. Here is how a request moves through ProCleanerUK:
- The cleaner requests time off in the staff app. They see their remaining balance before they ask.
- ProCleanerUK checks the allowance. If the request would take them over, it says so straight away, for example: “This needs 3.0 days, but only 2.0 days are left once 1.0 day in other requests waiting for approval is counted.”
- You get notified. Pending requests show as a count in the menu, so nothing gets missed.
- You approve or reject. The allowance is checked again on approval, so it is always against the latest balance.
- Everything updates live. The rota, the cleaner’s app and the balance all change at once, on every device.
Why pending requests are counted
A common trap: a cleaner with 3 days left sends three separate 2-day requests. Each one looks fine on its own, so all three get approved, and they end up 3 days over. ProCleanerUK counts requests still waiting for approval as well as approved ones, so the second request is flagged before it ever reaches you.
Absence on the scheduler: no more surprise no-shows
Holiday software that does not talk to your rota just moves the problem. In ProCleanerUK, absence and scheduling are the same system.
- Absences show on the scheduler in month, week and day views, colour-coded by type, including part-day absences with their times.
- Clashing jobs are flagged. If a cleaner is booked on a job while they are off, the job card turns purple with a STAFF UNAVAILABLE badge. This catches the sneaky ones, such as a weekly pattern job that lands on a holiday booked months later.
- You get warned when you book the absence. Adding time off shows you the jobs it clashes with, so you can reassign them there and then.
- You cannot drag a job onto someone who is off. Moving a job to a day when its cleaner is absent is blocked, with a message saying who is unavailable and why.
The result is simple: if someone is off, you know which customers are affected before the day, not when the customer rings.
Absence reporting
The absence report turns all of this into numbers you can act on:
- Days lost and the sickness rate, compared with the previous period, so you can see whether things are getting better or worse.
- Absence by type, so you know how much is planned holiday and how much is sickness.
- A month-by-month trend, to spot seasonal patterns, such as a January spike or the school summer holidays.
- A per-staff breakdown, so you can see who is off most and have the right conversation early.
For a cleaning business, sickness is not just a cost. It is cover you have to find at short notice, and a customer who notices. Spotting a trend early is far cheaper than firefighting it.
Getting set up in ProCleanerUK
Setting it up takes a few steps:
- In Settings > Absence Rules, choose your company default: upfront or accrual, your annual allowance and your accrual rate.
- On each staff profile, set their working days and normal day length.
- Override the method or rate for anyone who differs from the default, for example accrual for variable-hours cleaners.
- Add each person’s start date, so new starters are pro-rated correctly.
- Use Adjust Balance to bring in any holiday already taken or carried over this year.
- Set up regular Unavailability for anyone with fixed times they cannot work.
- Ask your team to book time off through the staff app from now on.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use upfront for some staff and accrual for others? Yes. Set a company default, then change the method on any individual staff profile.
Do bank holidays come out of the allowance? When you book bank holidays as absences, they count towards the allowance, in line with the GOV.UK rule that bank holidays can be part of the 5.6 weeks.
What happens if a cleaner’s hours change mid-year? For accrual staff nothing needs changing, because holiday follows the hours they actually work. For upfront staff, update their working days or day length and the allowance updates with it.
Can staff see their own balance? Yes. Cleaners see their remaining balance, and how it is earned, in the staff app before they request time off.
Take the admin out of absence
Holiday, sickness, birthdays, carry over and the rota, all in one place and all working out the maths for you. ProCleanerUK is built for UK cleaning businesses and you can try it free for 28 days.