Holiday request form template for UK employers

What's on the form

The form has four parts. The employee fills in the first three and hands it to their manager, who completes the fourth and gives a copy back. Every field is plain text in a table, so you can add your logo, rename a leave type or delete a row without breaking the layout. To use it in Google Docs, upload the file to Drive and open it with Google Docs.

The four parts of the holiday request form

Part	What it asks for
1. Your details	Name, job title, team, manager and the date of the request, which starts the notice clock
2. The leave	Leave type, first and last day, half days, the working days or hours asked for, the return date and who covers the work
3. The balance	The leave year, the entitlement, what's already taken or booked, this request and what's left after it
4. The decision	When the request arrived, the days of notice, approved or declined, the reason and other dates offered, and when it went into the leave record

The balance part matters more than it looks. When the employee writes down what they have left, an over-booking shows up before the manager signs, not when payroll runs at the end of the leave year.

The notice rule the form is built around

In Great Britain, the default notice rules for annual leave are in regulation 15 of the Working Time Regulations 1998. They apply unless a contract, collective agreement or workforce agreement sets different ones, and most holiday policies do. If yours says "four weeks' notice for more than a week off", that rule wins, and the form's notice line should say so.

• The worker's notice. To take leave, a worker gives notice of at least twice as many days as the leave: 10 days for 5 days off, 2 days for 1 day off.
• The employer's counter-notice. To refuse those dates, the employer gives notice of at least as many days as the leave asked for: 5 days for 5 days off.
• Leave the employer chooses. An employer can also require leave on set days, such as a Christmas closure, with notice of twice the length of that leave.

Every one of these notices has to be given before the date that the count points to, so GOV.UK adds a day: twice the leave plus one day for the worker, the leave plus one day for a refusal. The days are calendar days counted back from the first day of leave. Notice can be given on this form, by email or through a booking system; the regulations don't ask for a particular format.

A refusal only moves the leave. An employer can turn down particular dates, but it can't stop someone taking their statutory 5.6 weeks at all (regulation 13 and 13A), so a declined form should offer other dates.

A worked example

Greta Vogel works in NovaTech's Manchester office. She wants Monday 3 to Friday 7 August 2026 off: 5 days of annual leave, with no bank holiday in England that week.

1. Her notice. Twice 5 days is 10, so the count lands on Friday 24 July. Her form has to arrive before that, by Thursday 23 July at the latest: 11 days ahead, which is GOV.UK's "twice the leave plus one day".
2. NovaTech's counter-notice. To refuse those dates, the count is 5 days, landing on Wednesday 29 July, so the refusal has to reach Greta by Tuesday 28 July: 6 days before her first day off.
3. What happens in practice. Greta hands the form in on Friday 26 June, well ahead. Her manager sees that two of the five people on the support desk are already off that week and the team agreed no more than two at once, so she declines on 29 June, writes the reason on the form and offers 10 to 14 August, which Greta takes.

Had Greta asked on 27 July for the next week, she'd have given too little notice under the default rule. NovaTech could still approve it, since the rule sets a minimum and nothing stops an employer agreeing to short-notice leave.

A manager's checklist before signing

1. Check the notice. Count the days from the date received to the first day off and compare them with your policy, or with twice the leave plus one day if your policy is silent.
2. Check the balance. Entitlement minus taken and booked leave must cover the request. Count only working days, and leave out bank holidays your office closes for.
3. Check cover. Look at who else is off on those dates and whether the team's minimum staffing still holds.
4. Check blocked dates. If the dates fall in a period you've closed to leave, such as a stocktake or year end, say so on the form.
5. Treat requests in the same order. Decide clashing requests by a rule the team knows, such as first come first served or rotating school holidays, and write it in your policy.
6. Decline in time. A refusal must reach the employee before the counter-notice date. A late "no" doesn't meet the default rule.
7. Give a reason and other dates. Write both on the form; it keeps the conversation about when, not whether.
8. Record it. Update the leave record the same day and give the employee a copy of the signed form.

For handling clashing requests fairly, see how to approve leave requests fairly, and for the employee's side, can my employer refuse my holiday request?

Keeping the forms: the six-year rule

Since 6 April 2026, regulation 16B requires employers in Great Britain to keep records that show they have given workers their statutory holiday entitlement and paid it correctly, and to keep each record for six years from the date it was made. The regulations leave the format to the employer. Signed request forms, together with each person's entitlement and what they took, are a natural part of that record, so file them by leave year rather than throwing them away once the holiday is over.

Irregular-hours and part-year workers build up holiday differently, at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period, for leave years from 1 April 2024. Their form should show the balance in hours. The 12.07% holiday accrual calculator works it out.

When a paper form stops working

A form works while one manager handles a handful of requests and keeps the folder up to date. It gets harder as the team grows: forms go missing, balances are worked out by hand, two people book the same week because nobody could see the other's form, and six years of paper is a lot of folders.

A staff holiday booking system does the same job without the paper. In Absenca the request carries the dates and the balance, a minimum notice per leave type refuses requests made too late, the team calendar shows who else is off, and every request and decision is kept with who made it and when. It's free for up to 10 people. More free files are on the templates page.

Last checked on 21 October 2026 against the Working Time Regulations 1998 on legislation.gov.uk and GOV.UK guidance. It describes the default rules in Great Britain; Northern Ireland has its own regulations. This is general guidance, not legal advice, and your contracts and policy decide the details.