Holiday pay entitlement has gone up as of October 1st, 2007 - the perfect opportunity for us to relaunch our freelance holiday pay calculator - a great little Excel tool which will let you see how your holiday entitlement should be calculated, along with a breakdown of how it probably actually is. Just enter your weekly rate, number of weeks worked and days per week, and the spreadsheet does the rest - and walks you through the whole process. Many employers still make you pay for your own holiday - a right you are clearly entitled to over and above your agreed freelance rate. Enter your own contract details, and see how much you are losing out by.

A new EU ruling recently made it clear, once and for all, that a worker's entitlement to paid time off cannot be replaced by an element of pay. It is further and final confirmation that the practice of deducting holiday pay from a freelancer's agreed rate, to add it back on at the end of their contract, is entirely contrary to European law. More in our forum here.

Consequently we are stepping up our campaign to find out who is doing it. With the words "holiday pay" in your subject line, contact us at our usual email address, and if you have had holiday pay deducted from an agreed rate in the last six months, tell us who by. At this stage it is purely to build up a profile - your anonymity, as ever, is safe, and we will not use, publish, or pass on any of the information or identifying details without coming back to you for permission. But dropping us a quick email with the names of the companies or broadcasters doing this will be hugely helpful.

Towards the end of 2005, we invited you to take part in a repeat of the holiday pay survey which we first carried out in 2003. The headline statistic is that where 39% of freelancers had holiday pay deducted from their agreed rate in 2003, that figure had gone up to just under 50% in 2005 - despite the fact that even PACT advises its members to pay holiday pay on top of a freelancer's agreed rate (here). The full findings are here, and you can contribute to the debate by posting your thoughts in this thread, too.

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