How to get extra 29 days off work in 2026 as new bank holiday confirmed
Anyone who has ever had to book time of work knows it's a fine art where picking the right moments in the calendar can spin a few days holiday into many more.
Then there's the new bank holiday Scotland is getting this year as a one-off celebration for their men's football team making it to the World Cup for the first time in absolutely ages.
They're getting a bank holiday on 15 June, the day after their opening World Cup fixture against Haiti.
However, even if you're not Scottish you can still leverage your annual leave to get 29 extra days bolted onto your holidays if you plan it right and all your requests work out well.
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As long as you've still got 24 days left of annual leave left you can stretch your time off to gargantuan proportions, though you'll need to be quick because the first bit of time you need off comes next week.
Easter Holidays
The first bit of time you'll need to book off starts from next Monday (30 March) until the Thursday (2 April), because then you hit the bank holiday weekend.
If you book 7 April to 10 April off as well then you'll be off work from 28 March and won't have to be back at work until 13 April, having turned eight days of holiday into a stretch of 16 consecutive days off.
Unless you're in Scotland, which doesn't have a bank holiday for Easter Monday (6 April), so you'll be having to book nine days off instead.
Then again, were you really planning on being in a fit state to work by the time 15 June rolls around?
Mayday
May the fourth be with you for a leisurely Spring if you play your cards right.
This year's early May bank holiday lands on 4 May itself, so you can turn four days of holiday into nine consecutive days off work if you take the rest of the week after the bank holiday off.
You'll want to repeat the same trick at the end of the month because the Spring bank holiday is 25 May and you can take the four days after it off to score another nine days of time off in a row.
At this point we've used up 16 days of annual leave to score 34 total days of time off in just over a couple of months.
The end of Summer
For most people in the UK it's going to be a while until the next bank holiday, though of course Scotland get 15 June off for the World Cup so anyone wanting to make a week of the weather and sport (their second group game is on 19 July) could repeat the trick of turning four days into nine.
They also get their Summer bank holiday on 3 August, while Northern Ireland gets 13 July off for the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.
However, for those living in England or Wales the next bank holiday is 31 August (Northern Ireland also gets this one) which is a Monday, so you'd want to be taking 1 September through to 4 September off to bid farewell to the summer.
Doing any of these is another four days of holiday spent to get nine back, so we're up to 20 days of annual leave booked to get 43 days off, so we'll just act like you did one of these.
A Winter's Tale
Scotland gets St Andrew's Day (30 November), but for the rest of the UK the remaining bank holidays are for Christmas Day, which is on a Friday this year, and Boxing Day which falls on a weekend so the bank holiday gets shunted to the next Monday (28 December).
As such, if you book off 21 through 24 December then you finish work on Mad Friday (18 December this year) and you're on a 10 day stretch off work from then on with just four days holiday.
That's how you turn 24 days of annual leave into 53 days worth of holiday, allowing you to bolt 29 days onto whatever plans you had with the time you took off work.
Joe Harker