Working a stat day? Here is what it costs.

Public holiday pay in New Zealand comes down to two rules, and once you have them the rest is detail.

One: time and a half. If someone works on a public holiday, you pay them at least one and a half times their normal rate for the hours they actually work. A worker on $30 an hour who does eight hours on a stat day is paid $45 an hour for those eight hours, which is $360 for the day. That is the floor. You can pay more, never less.

Two: the alternative holiday. If that public holiday was an otherwise working day for them, a day they would normally have worked, they also earn an alternative holiday. A whole paid day off, taken later. It stacks on top of the time and a half. So the real cost of having someone in on a stat day is the penalty pay now plus a paid day off owed for later.

Nearly every public holiday question hangs on one idea: was it an otherwise working day for this person? That means a day they would have worked if it had not been a public holiday.

If Labour Day lands on a Monday and your employee always works Mondays, it is an otherwise working day. Work it, and they get time and a half plus a day in lieu. Do not work it, and you still pay them their normal day's pay for the day off. If they never work Mondays, none of that applies: no lieu day if they come in, no pay if they do not. For someone with regular set days it is obvious. For casuals and people whose days move around, you look at the pattern of what they actually worked in the weeks before. When it is genuinely unclear, the law expects you to weigh it up in good faith rather than just say no.

They work, and it is a normal working day. $30 an hour, eight hours. Time and a half is $45 an hour, so $360 for the day, plus a full alternative holiday to take later. That lieu day is worth roughly another $240 when they take it, so the day really costs you about $600.

They work, but it is not a day they normally work. Same $360 in time and a half, because worked hours are always paid at time and a half. But no alternative holiday, because it was not an otherwise working day. This is the one people get backwards in both directions.

They do not work, and it is a normal working day. They are off, but you still pay them their relevant daily pay, roughly $240 for a normal eight-hour day, as if it were any other working day. A public holiday that falls on their normal day is a paid day off, not an unpaid one. Miss this and you have quietly underpaid them.

Three traps catch trade employers over and over.

• Cash jobs on stat days. Paying someone flat cash for a public holiday shift skips the time and a half and the lieu day. It is still an underpayment, and it is exactly the kind of thing that surfaces later in a dispute. Pay it properly and keep the record.
• Forgetting the day in lieu. The time and a half is easy to remember because it is money going out that day. The alternative holiday is easy to forget because it is a future cost. It is still owed, and it does not expire, so an unrecorded pile of lieu days becomes a nasty liability when someone leaves.
• Not paying for the day off. If the stat day is a normal working day and the person stays home, they are still paid. Treating a public holiday as an unpaid day off is one of the most common underpayments there is.

Most trades shut down over Christmas, and that stretch is thick with public holidays: Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, and the day after. During a close-down, the public holidays that fall inside it are still paid if they are otherwise working days, exactly as they would be any other time of year. The close-down does not cancel them.

The rest of the shutdown days come out of annual leave, or are unpaid if someone has not accrued enough, which mostly bites new starters. If you run an annual close-down, put it in writing and give fair notice so nobody is surprised by a light pay packet in January. Counting the working days across that period is its own headache, which is what our working days calculator is for.