Garden leave sounds lovely: getting paid to sit at home. The rules are less obvious. Can you start job hunting? Can you start your new job early? What happens to your benefits?
This is the practical guide to garden leave in the UK: what it means, what you can and cannot do, and how to negotiate if the terms do not suit you.
Garden leave is not a statutory concept. There is no Act of Parliament that defines it, and it is not mentioned in the Employment Rights Act 1996. It sits entirely in your contract. What the statute does fix is the length of the notice period it runs alongside: one week if your employer dismisses you and you have between one month and two years' service, then one week per complete year, capped at 12 weeks after 12 years, as set out on GOV.UK. If you are the one resigning, your statutory minimum is one week once you have been employed for a month.
What is garden leave?
Garden leave (or "gardening leave": same thing) is when you've resigned or been given notice, and your employer tells you to stay home. You're still employed. You still get paid. You just don't come to work. The name's a bit tongue-in-cheek: the implication being you've got nothing to do but water the plants.
The critical thing to understand is that your contract is still fully in force. Every clause still applies: confidentiality, non-compete, duty of fidelity, all of it. You haven't left yet. You're just not allowed in the building.
When is garden leave used?
Employers use garden leave when they're worried about what a departing employee might do with access to the business. Typical scenarios:
- Joining a competitor. They don't want you sitting in the office downloading client lists the week before you join a rival.
- Client-facing roles. If you've got strong personal relationships with key clients, they want to start transitioning those relationships to someone else while you're still technically on the payroll.
- Trade secrets. Very common in finance, tech, and pharma. They want a cooling-off period before you take sensitive knowledge to your next employer.
- Avoiding disruption. Sometimes they just don't want a lame-duck employee sitting around for three months, distracting the team.
Your rights during garden leave
Pay and benefits
Full salary. Regular allowances. Bonus payments (subject to your scheme rules). Pension contributions. Private medical. Company car. The lot. Your employer can't reduce your pay just because you're on garden leave. You also keep accruing holiday.
Holiday entitlement
Employers commonly require you to take accrued holiday during garden leave. They can do this, but only with notice. Under regulation 15 of the Working Time Regulations 1998, an employer requiring you to take leave on particular days must give notice at least twice as long as the leave. So to make you take five days, they must tell you at least ten days beforehand. When you request leave, GOV.UK says you must give twice as long as the leave plus 1 day, so eleven days' notice for five days off. A contractual holiday policy can vary either figure.
You continue to accrue statutory holiday throughout garden leave, because you are still employed. Statutory entitlement is 5.6 weeks a year, which is 28 days for a five-day week and can include bank holidays. Anything you have accrued and not taken by your leaving date must be paid out.
Right to work
For some roles the courts recognise an implied right to actually do the job, not merely to be paid for it. That was the ruling in William Hill Organisation Ltd v Tucker [1998] IRLR 313, where the Court of Appeal held that a skilled employee whose work required regular practice could not simply be sent home. If being kept away is measurably damaging your skills or professional standing, that is the argument to make.
In practice, though, courts usually uphold garden leave where there's a legitimate business reason. The key test is reasonableness: how long is it, what's your role, and is there a genuine need to keep you away?
Your obligations during garden leave
- Stay available. You need to be contactable during normal working hours. They might call you for handover questions or ask you to come in for a meeting.
- Keep secrets. Every confidentiality clause in your contract still applies. Don't share anything with anyone, especially not your new employer.
- Don't start your new job. You're still employed. Working for someone else during garden leave is a breach of contract. Full stop.
- Don't contact clients. Most garden leave clauses specifically ban you from reaching out to clients, suppliers, or even colleagues for business purposes.
- Hand back your stuff. Laptop, phone, building pass, documents: expect to return all of it on day one of garden leave.
Can your employer put you on garden leave without a contractual clause?
If your contract has a garden leave clause, it's straightforward: they can use it. Most senior-level contracts include one.
Without a clause? It's murkier. They can ask you to stay home, and most people won't argue because they're still getting paid. But without a contractual basis, the restrictions that normally come with garden leave (no client contact, etc.) are much harder for the employer to enforce.
If you're in this situation and feel the terms being imposed are unreasonable, get legal advice. You might have more room to push back than you think.
Negotiating garden leave
There's usually room to negotiate, especially if you've got leverage. Things worth pushing on:
- Duration. Three months' garden leave when there's no real business reason for it? Push for a shorter period.
- Restrictions. You might be able to relax certain terms: like being allowed to stay in touch with colleagues who are also personal friends.
- Early release. If your new employer is pressing for an early start, you can negotiate to end your employment sooner.
- Equipment. Some employers will let you keep a laptop or phone for personal use until your end date.
- Holiday pay. Rather than being forced to burn holiday during garden leave, negotiate to be paid for it instead.
Garden leave vs payment in lieu of Notice (PILON)
People confuse these two constantly. They're not the same thing. With PILON, your employment ends immediately and you get a lump sum. With garden leave, you're still employed: you just don't go to work.
The practical difference is large. During garden leave, all your contractual restrictions are live because you are still an employee. With PILON, only post-termination restrictions such as non-compete clauses apply, and those are generally harder for employers to enforce in court.
Tax treatment differs too. Since 6 April 2018 every payment in lieu of notice is taxable as earnings, whether or not your contract provides for one. HMRC calls the taxable element post-employment notice pay and sets out the formula in EIM13874 of the Employment Income Manual. The old practice of paying a non-contractual PILON free of tax under the £30,000 termination payment exemption no longer works.
If your priority is starting your new role ASAP, PILON is what you want. If you're happy with paid time off, garden leave can be genuinely pleasant. Use our notice period calculator to work out your key dates under either scenario.