HoursHQ is a set of UK calculators for work, hours and pay, with guides explaining the rules behind them.
Everything here is free, there is no sign-up, and nothing you enter into a calculator is stored or sent anywhere.
Why it exists
Most UK pay and entitlement content online is out of date.
That is not a rhetorical complaint. While researching the redundancy guides I checked the statutory weekly pay cap across five sources on the first page of search results. Four were wrong — including payroll providers and HR software companies who should know better. One had figures two years stale. While writing the student loan guide I found sites publishing a Plan 5 threshold that has never existed at any point.
These are not obscure details. They are the headline numbers people search for, on pages that rank well, published by businesses that sell payroll services.
HoursHQ exists because that seemed worth fixing.
Who writes it
I am Nathan Cole. I build the calculators on this site and I write the guides.
I am a software developer, not a payroll professional or an employment lawyer, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I do is read the legislation and the official guidance, encode it precisely, and check it. That turns out to be the part most sites skip.
If you need advice about your own situation, the right people are Acas in Great Britain, the Labour Relations Agency in Northern Ireland, or an employment solicitor. Nothing on this site is legal, tax or financial advice.
How the figures are checked
Every statutory figure comes from a primary source: legislation.gov.uk for the law itself, and GOV.UK, gov.scot, Acas or nidirect for current thresholds. Never from another calculator site, and never from a summary of a summary.
The rules are stored as versioned data, separately from the calculator code. Each tax year is its own record carrying its own source references and the date the figures were last checked. That is why a calculation for a past date uses that year’s limits rather than today’s, and why the annual April update is a data change rather than a rewrite.
Every calculator shows its workings. If you cannot see how a figure was reached, treat that as a fault and tell me.
You can see every source the site relies on, generated automatically from the same data the calculators use, so it cannot drift from what they actually do.
Where the law is unclear
Some rules are genuinely unsettled, and I would rather say so than pick an interpretation and present it as fact.
The clearest example is holiday accrual for irregular hours workers in Northern Ireland, where reputable sources contradict each other about whether the 2024 reforms apply. The calculator shows a figure and tells you plainly that the position is contested. The guide explains what is settled and what is not.
The same applies to classification questions. Whether you count as an irregular hours worker is a legal question about your contract, not something a calculator can decide, and the tools say so rather than quietly assuming.
What I got wrong
Two worked examples in the guides were wrong when first drafted, and I caught both by running them back through the calculators.
One overstated a redundancy figure by claiming that turning 41 during a notice period immediately increases entitlement. It does not — you have to complete a full year of service at that age first. The correction became a section of the guide, because the reason is genuinely useful.
The other understated an enhanced redundancy comparison by several thousand pounds through a simple arithmetic slip.
I mention these because a site claiming to be more accurate than its competitors should be honest about its own errors. If you find one, tell me and I will fix it and say so.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, I want to know. Corrections from readers are the most useful thing this site receives.
That goes double for Northern Ireland, where the position on holiday accrual needs a definitive answer I have not been able to find.
Last reviewed 30 August 2026.