Annualised hours
Annualised hours means the contract sets a number of hours for the year, and the rota uses them unevenly. A quiet January and a busy August can both be inside the same agreement. The year is the contract. The pay period is still where the minimum wage is tested.
The year is not one pay period
People use annualised hours so a seasonal business can put the hours where the work is. The risk is paying the same amount every month while the hours swing. GOV.UK’s minimum-wage guidance treats salaried hours work under its own rules, and time work under others. Which box the contract falls into changes the arithmetic. A busy month of time work can fall below the rate even when the year, looked at in one lump, would not. You do not average a quiet month back into a busy one to rescue it, unless the worker really is in the salaried-hours category and you have applied that category’s rules.
Holiday is still owed. A regular pattern uses 5.6 weeks. Someone whose hours are irregular, or who works only part of the year with unpaid weeks between, may be on the 12.07% method for a leave year from 1 April 2024. Annualised hours are not automatically either of those. Read the contract. A person who works every week, with the hours moving inside a set annual total, is not the same as a term-time worker who has unpaid weeks off.
What the rota is for
Shiftbrook does not keep a pot of 1,800 hours and burn it down. It publishes the shifts you add, week by week. Copying last week repeats a week. It does not spread a year. If you need a running total of hours approved so far, that total is in the timesheets, not in a separate annualised-hours account. There is no switch for this contract type.
The product also does not check the hourly rate. Approved hours download as a CSV so payroll can test the pay reference period against the rate for the person’s age. Working-time warnings on a saved week, including the 48-hour average, still appear. An annual contract does not turn those warnings off. Last checked against GOV.UK in October 2026. This is not legal advice.
Sources
Minimum wage · Shift patterns · Holiday entitlement calculator · Timesheets