How to maximise your annual leave in 2026

After all the excitement of Christmas and New Year, it’s not long before we all find ourselves back at work with no national holiday or long weekend to look forward to until April. Pair that with biting cold weather and cloudy grey evenings, and January tends to be an all-around dismal month. 

One way to ward off those winter blues? Getting your 2026 holidays in the calendar. And if you’re strategic about when you use your precious annual leave days, you’ll be able to squeeze a whole seven weeks of holiday in, maybe even with a few extra days to spare. 

Of course, there’s no way you can cheat the system and get more days off for free, but you can organise your holidays around public holidays to make it feel as though your annual leave stretches even further. 

For example, if you book off March 31 until April 3 next to the Easter bank holidays, you can get 10 days off for the price of just four annual leave days. And in August you can get nine days for the price of four by taking September 1 until September 4 off after the August bank holiday. All in all, you could take 23 days of annual leave this in order to enjoy 53 days of holiday. 

Every date you should take off in 2026 to get the most out of your annual leave

• March 31-April 3 (10 days off for four days leave)
• May 5-8 (nine days off for four days leave)
• May 26-29 (nine days off for four days leave)
• September 1-4 (nine days off for four days leave)
• December 21-24 and December 29-31 (16 days off for seven leave days)

How should you use all that time off, you ask? Well, you could explore all the glorious things that the UK has to offer. We’ve got guides to the best of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as locally curated guides to brilliant cities like Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Brighton. Or, you could go further afield. Find inspiration for trips abroad with Time Out’s guides to the 26 best new things to do in the world, the best cities in the world right now and the most underrated places to go in 2026. 

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