WTD Pay in the NHS: The Section 13.9 Annual Leave Rule Explained

Last updated: 28 September 2026 · Figures verified against the NHS Employers 2026/27 pay circular.

By the NHS Bands Pay editorial team

What does WTD pay mean?

WTD stands for Working Time Directive — the European working-time rules, carried into UK law by the Working Time Regulations 1998, which guarantee workers paid annual leave (28 days a year including bank holidays for a full-time worker). Because leave must be paid leave, the law developed the principle that holiday pay should reflect a worker's normal remuneration, not just bare basic pay.

In the NHS, that principle was written directly into Agenda for Change at Section 13.9. Many staff first meet the phrase "WTD pay" on their payslip or ESR record, where it appears as a line keeping enhancements going while they are on leave — sometimes labelled a WTD element or WTD averaging payment. It is not a bonus, and it is not extra money on top of your normal earnings. It is the mechanism that stops your pay dropping the moment you take the holiday you are entitled to.

This matters most for the large number of NHS staff whose real earnings sit well above their basic salary: nurses, healthcare assistants, paramedics, porters, domestics and others who regularly work nights, weekends and bank holidays. Without Section 13.9, a nurse who depends on unsocial-hours enhancements would take a pay cut every time they booked annual leave — which would discourage people from taking leave at all.

The Section 13.9 rule in full

Section 13 of the NHS Terms and Conditions of Service Handbook covers annual leave and general public holidays. Paragraph 13.9 reads:

"13.9 Pay during annual leave will include regularly paid supplements, including any recruitment and retention premia, payments for work outside normal hours and high cost area supplements. Pay is calculated on the basis of what the individual would have received had he/she been at work. This would be based on the previous three months at work or any other reference period that may be locally agreed."

There are three ideas packed into that paragraph, and each one does real work:

1. "Pay during annual leave will include regularly paid supplements" — leave pay is not basic pay only. It must include the extras you regularly earn.
2. "on the basis of what the individual would have received had he/she been at work" — the test is personal. It is what you would have earned, given your normal pattern of shifts and extras, not a service average.
3. "based on the previous three months at work or any other reference period that may be locally agreed" — the default averaging window is three months, but local partnerships can agree something different (for example, twelve months for staff with strongly seasonal patterns).

Source: NHS Terms and Conditions of Service Handbook (NHS Employers), Part 3, Section 13: Annual leave and general public holidays.

What counts as a "regularly paid supplement"

The handbook names three categories expressly and leaves the door open to others:

• Payments for work outside normal hours — the big one. This is your unsocial-hours enhancements under Section 2: the +30%/+60% uplifts for nights, Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays worked by staff in bands 4–9, the higher rates for bands 1–3, and the averaged enhancements paid to regular unsocial-hours staff such as ambulance crews under Annex 5. If unsocial hours are part of your regular pattern, they are part of your leave pay.
• High cost area supplements (HCAS) — London weighting is paid as a supplement to basic pay, so it continues during leave. A Band 5 nurse in inner London does not lose her 20% HCAS for the fortnight she is on holiday.
• Recruitment and retention premia (RRP) — where a trust pays an RRP to attract or keep staff in hard-to-fill roles, it counts as a regularly paid supplement.
• Regular overtime — overtime you work regularly forms part of normal remuneration. This expressly includes voluntary overtime that is worked on a regular basis (see the legal background below). Occasional, one-off overtime does not count — the word "regularly" is doing the heavy lifting.

What does not count: one-off payments, occasional overtime, expenses, and payments tied to something other than your normal working pattern. The question payroll should always be asking is whether the payment is a regular feature of what you earn.

How the three-month averaging works

Because enhancements vary shift by shift, leave pay cannot simply repeat last month's payslip. Instead, payroll looks back over a reference period — three months by default — and works out what you would have earned had you been at work.

In practice, most trusts do this one of two ways:

• Payslip-based averaging: the regularly paid supplements from your recent payslips are averaged and a WTD element is added to your pay while you are on leave, so your leave-period earnings track your working-period earnings.
• Rota-based calculation: for staff on stable rotas, payroll (or ESR) can project what you would have worked during the leave period from your rostered pattern, including the enhancements those shifts attract. NHS Scotland guidance explicitly allows "virtual rotas" showing what hours the employee would have worked in the reference period had they been at work.

The reference period can be changed by local agreement. Twelve-month averaging is sometimes used where work is seasonal or where a three-month window would give a distorted picture — for example, for staff whose unsocial hours cluster around particular times of year. Either way, the methodology must be agreed locally in partnership, which means your union representatives should be involved in how your trust does the maths.

Two fine points worth knowing. First, the averaging looks at months at work — periods of long-term sickness or previous leave are generally excluded so they do not drag the average down. Second, Section 13.9 covers annual leave. Sick pay has its own parallel rule at Section 14.4, which uses the same "what you would have received had you been at work" formulation — confirmed in a Scottish Government FOI response — but it is a separate provision with separate calculations.

Source: Scottish Government FOI release on annual leave and sick pay calculations, referencing AfC handbook paragraphs 13.9 and 14.4.

Worked example: a Band 5 nurse's leave pay

To see how the rule bites, take an illustrative Band 5 staff nurse at the entry step: £32,073 a year, or £16.38 an hour, in 2026/27. She works a regular pattern that includes roughly 8 hours of night shifts a week. Nights attract a +30% enhancement for bands 4–9:

• Night enhancement per week: 8 hours × £16.38 × 30% = £39.31 a week
• That is roughly £170 a month of regularly paid unsocial-hours money

When she takes two weeks' annual leave, Section 13.9 means her leave pay should still reflect that roughly £39-a-week average — her pay for the leave fortnight should look like a normal fortnight's earnings (basic pay plus the averaged enhancements), not basic pay alone. Without the rule, she would lose about £78 for the fortnight simply for taking holiday.

This is an illustration, not a promise of exact figures: your trust's reference period, your exact shift mix and whether any of your overtime counts as "regular" will all move the number. But the principle is fixed — leave pay tracks normal earnings.

Who WTD pay applies to

• All Agenda for Change staff — Section 13.9 is part of the national AfC handbook, so it covers substantive AfC employees in England, and the equivalent AfC frameworks in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Agenda for Change applies UK-wide with national variations — see NHS Scotland pay, NHS Wales pay and NHS Northern Ireland pay.)
• Full-time and part-time staff — part-timers are covered on a pro-rata basis, measured against their own contracted hours and their own pattern of enhancements.
• Shift workers and office-hours staff alike — if you work standard weekday hours with no enhancements and no regular overtime, Section 13.9 changes nothing for you; your leave pay is your basic pay, which is what you would have received at work anyway. The rule only adds something where there is something regular to add.

It does not apply in the same way to:

• Bank-only workers — bank staff are paid for hours worked and accrue statutory holiday pay on those hours; there is no annual-leave averaging because there is no salaried leave period to average across.
• Very senior managers — VSMs are on individual contracts outside Agenda for Change, so their leave-pay terms are contractual rather than handbook-based. See our guide to NHS managers' pay and the VSM framework.
• Medical and dental staff — doctors are on separate national contracts with their own provisions.

Common confusions about WTD pay

"My payslip shows basic pay only during my leave — is that right?"

Not necessarily. Some payrolls show a basic-pay line plus a separate WTD/averaging line; others roll it into one figure. What matters is the total: if you regularly earn enhancements and your total leave-period pay equals basic pay only, something is missing. Ask payroll for a breakdown.

"Does WTD pay apply to bank holidays?"

Section 13.9 is about annual leave. Bank holidays have their own rules: full-time staff get 8 public holidays a year on top of annual leave (see NHS annual leave entitlement), part-timers' public-holiday entitlement is rolled into their annual leave, and enhancements for working a bank holiday are separate unsocial-hours payments.

"I only started recently — do I get WTD pay?"

You are covered from the start, but the averaging needs history. With less than three months' service, payroll will use whatever reference period is available or locally agreed — the principle (pay as if at work) does not wait for the full three months to elapse.

"Does it cover my overtime?"

Regular overtime, yes — including voluntary overtime worked regularly. Occasional one-off overtime, no. If you do two extra shifts every single month, that is regular; if you did one extra shift in March and none since, it is not.

"Is WTD pay pensionable?"

WTD/averaging payments are generally treated as pensionable pay where the underlying payments (enhancements, overtime) are pensionable — regular overtime and unsocial-hours enhancements normally are. Your NHS pension contributions are based on whole-time-equivalent pensionable pay, so averaged leave pay feeds through in the usual way.

"WTD pay vs the Working Time Directive opt-out — same thing?"

No. The 48-hour-week opt-out (common for junior doctors and some other groups) is a separate part of working-time law about hours. WTD pay is about pay during leave. People search both under "WTD", which is where much of the confusion comes from.

The legal background: Working Time Directive cases

Section 13.9 did not appear from nowhere — it is the NHS's contractual expression of principles hammered out in employment tribunals and courts:

• Bear Scotland v Fulton (2014): the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that non-guaranteed overtime — overtime the employer is not obliged to offer but the worker regularly works — must be included in holiday pay for the four weeks of EU-derived annual leave. "Normal remuneration" means what the worker normally receives.
• Flowers v East of England Ambulance Service (2019): the Court of Appeal held that voluntary overtime could count towards holiday pay where it was worked regularly enough to form part of normal pay. This is directly relevant to NHS ambulance staff and anyone else doing regular voluntary overtime.

The practical upshot for NHS staff: if an extra is a settled, regular part of your earnings, the law expects it to follow you onto annual leave, and Section 13.9 is the handbook machinery that makes it happen. If you are in dispute with your employer about whether your overtime counts as "regular", these are the cases your union representative will be citing.

What to do if your WTD pay looks wrong

1. Check a leave-month payslip against a working-month payslip. If the only difference is the missing enhancements with no WTD/averaging line making up the gap, flag it.
2. Check your ESR record. Your Electronic Staff Record holds your assignment, shift pattern and leave bookings — errors here (wrong pattern, missing enhancements) are a common root cause.
3. Ask payroll for the calculation. You are entitled to understand your own pay. Ask which reference period was used and which supplements were included.
4. Talk to your union rep. The reference-period methodology is meant to be agreed locally in partnership — if your trust's approach looks wrong, it is a collective issue as well as an individual one.
5. Keep records. Rotas, timesheets and payslips for at least the last three to six months make any query far easier to resolve.

Frequently asked questions

What is WTD pay in the NHS?

WTD pay is the continued payment of regularly earned extras - such as unsocial-hours enhancements and regular overtime - while you are on annual leave. Section 13.9 of the Agenda for Change handbook says pay during annual leave must reflect what you would have received had you been at work, averaged over the previous three months.

Does my unsocial-hours pay continue when I am on annual leave?

If you regularly work unsocial hours, yes. Section 13.9 says pay during annual leave includes regularly paid supplements, including payments for work outside normal hours. A nurse who regularly works nights keeps an averaged share of those enhancements while on leave.

What counts as a regularly paid supplement for WTD pay?

Unsocial-hours enhancements, regular overtime (including voluntary overtime worked regularly), high cost area supplements (HCAS) and recruitment and retention premia. One-off or occasional payments do not count.

How is WTD pay calculated?

On the basis of what you would have received had you been at work, normally averaged over the previous three months at work, or any other reference period agreed locally between management and staff representatives.

Does WTD pay apply to NHS bank staff?

Bank workers are paid for the hours they work, so there is no annual-leave averaging in the same way; bank staff accrue paid statutory leave based on hours worked. Substantive staff on Agenda for Change contracts are covered by Section 13.9.

Is WTD pay the same as overtime pay?

No. WTD pay is not extra pay on top of your normal earnings. It is the mechanism that stops your pay dropping when you take leave, by continuing an average of the enhancements and overtime you would otherwise have earned.

Do VSM directors and NHS managers get WTD pay?

Section 13.9 applies to Agenda for Change staff. Very senior managers are on individual VSM contracts with their own terms, so their leave-pay arrangements sit outside AfC - see our guide to NHS managers' pay and the VSM framework.

Sources and independence

Source: NHS Terms and Conditions of Service Handbook (NHS Employers), Part 3, Section 13.9.

Source: Scottish Government FOI release on annual leave and sick pay calculations, referencing AfC handbook paragraphs 13.9 and 14.4.

Source: NHS Employers unsocial hours factsheet.

NHS Bands Pay is an independent information website. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the National Health Service. Figures are full-time equivalent (37.5 hours/week) for England unless stated. Always check your trust's ESR record and your payslip for your actual pay.