Set up the holiday calendar

What this achieves

The holiday calendar records the days your company does not work, so they are not counted against anyone’s leave. A holiday scoped to a location or department is excluded only for the employees it applies to.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Settings → Leave.
Open the Holidays tab.
Select Add Holiday.
Under Basics, enter the Name and Date, choose the Type, and add a Description if useful.

Example: a bank holiday recorded as a Public Holiday on its date.
Under Recurrence, switch on Recurs annually and set the Month (1-12) and Day (1-31) if the holiday falls on the same date each year.
Under Status, leave the Status as Active.
Select Create holiday.

Holiday types

Option	Description
Public Holiday	A statutory or nationally observed holiday.
Company Holiday	A day your company closes that is not a public holiday.
Regional Holiday	A holiday observed in some regions and not others.
Religious Holiday	A holiday observed on religious grounds.
Optional Holiday	A holiday employees may choose to observe.

The type is descriptive and is what lets you tell a company closure apart from a statutory day when reading the calendar back.

Holidays are excluded only for employees in scope

A holiday scoped to specific locations or departments is excluded from leave-day counts for the affected employees only. An unscoped holiday applies to everyone.

This is what makes the calendar work for a company operating in more than one place — the same request spanning the same dates can consume a different number of days for two employees.

Example: a holiday scoped to HC Corp UK Ltd’s London office is not deducted from the leave of someone based in Manchester, so their request across those dates costs them a day where the London employee’s does not.

A current limitation: location and department scoping cannot yet be set on this screen, so a holiday you create here applies to everyone. If you need a holiday scoped to particular sites or departments, ask your Humavera contact to arrange it.

Recurring holidays

Annual holidays are regenerated for each new policy year from the configured month and day. Use the generate-recurring action, which names the year it will produce — Generate recurring for 2026 — rather than adding each entry one at a time.

Holidays that move each year — those tied to a lunar or ecclesiastical calendar — need a date each year rather than a recurrence rule, because a fixed month and day would put them on the wrong date.

Example: a fixed-date bank holiday recurs annually. A holiday that moves needs its own dated entry each year.

Cancelling a holiday

Setting the Status to Cancelled takes the day out of the calendar without deleting the record. Prefer that to deletion where a holiday has already affected leave calculations, so the history still explains itself.

What happens next

Once holidays exist, they are subtracted from working-day counts when employees request leave. The day figure shown in the request form is an estimate that excludes weekends; the server also subtracts the holidays that apply to that employee’s location, and the server’s figure is the one that counts. Holidays also appear on the leave calendar, so managers see closures alongside team absence.