Rest Day Working and Time Off in Lieu (TOIL)

The notice-period distinction

The amount of notice given before a rest day is worked determines both the rate of compensation and, critically, whether cash payment is even an option — and the dividing line is 15 days.

If an officer is given standard notice before the rest day in question and is required to work it, Police Regulations 2003 (Regulation 26/Annex H) entitle them to an alternative rest day, taken as Time Off in Lieu. This is not a cash-or-TOIL choice — at standard notice, TOIL is the entitlement, full stop.

If the notice given is short, the position is different — this is where a genuine cash-or-TOIL choice exists, since short-notice rest day working does carry a cash-pay entitlement. The logic behind the higher short-notice rate is straightforward: the less notice an officer has to rearrange childcare, plans, or simply mentally prepare for giving up a rest day, the greater the disruption, and the higher compensation and the added flexibility of a genuine cash option both reflect that.

This structure creates a clear incentive for forces to plan resourcing and give as much notice as possible when rest day working is foreseeable — since standard notice is TOIL-only, it costs the force nothing in immediate cash terms — while still providing officers a fair, and financially flexible, mechanism when genuinely short-notice operational needs arise, which are sometimes unavoidable given the nature of policing.

Worked examples

Take a Sergeant on a basic hourly rate of roughly £24 (illustrative — use the Police Pay Calculator on this site to find your own precise hourly rate from your salary and pay point). If that Sergeant is told, three weeks in advance, that they'll need to work an 8-hour rest day shift due to a planned public order operation, this falls under standard notice. There is no cash option here — the Sergeant banks TOIL at the enhanced 1.333x value, meaning roughly 10.7 hours of time off credited for the 8 hours actually worked (8 hours x 1.333), depending on how their force's system translates the multiplier into banked time.

Now take the same Sergeant, but this time they're called at four days' notice to cover an unexpected staffing gap on what was meant to be a rest day. This falls under short notice, triggering the 1.5x rate — and here, a real choice exists. The Sergeant can take cash payment for the 8-hour shift, worth roughly £288 at £36 an hour, or instead bank the enhanced TOIL equivalent — 12 hours for the 8 hours worked (8 hours x 1.5).

These examples illustrate the general mechanics, but the precise administrative detail of how TOIL is credited, and any force-level nuances on how the cash option is offered and processed at short notice, can vary by force, so it's worth checking your own force's rest day working policy for the specifics that apply to you.

Choosing between cash and TOIL — at short notice only

Because standard-notice rest day working is TOIL only, the real cash-versus-TOIL decision only comes up when you're called in at short notice. When that choice exists, the right answer depends heavily on individual circumstances rather than there being an objectively "better" option.

Taking cash makes sense if you need or want the immediate income — for instance if you're saving for something specific, managing tighter monthly finances, or simply prefer not to accumulate large amounts of time you might struggle to find opportunities to use. It's also the more straightforward, lower-risk option in the sense that once it's paid, it's paid — there's no risk of losing it to an expiry policy or struggling to get approval to take it later.

Banking TOIL, even at short notice where cash was available, can still make sense if you're not under immediate financial pressure and would value future time off more than the immediate cash — for example if you're planning around childcare, want to build up a block of time for a holiday, or simply prefer a healthier balance between work and rest over the medium term. The trade-off is that TOIL isn't guaranteed to be usable whenever you like; it's subject to force operational approval when you come to book it, similar to annual leave, and busy periods can sometimes make it hard to get TOIL approved exactly when you want it.

Some forces process the short-notice cash-or-TOIL choice on a case-by-case, officer's-preference basis; others have a stated default, particularly during periods of high operational demand where budget pressures may shape which option a force encourages. It's worth understanding your own force's current policy and any operational constraints before assuming you'll always get your preferred option when the choice genuinely applies.

Tax treatment: cash pay versus TOIL

A point that sometimes causes confusion is how TOIL is treated for tax purposes compared to cash payment, so it's worth being clear about the mechanics — this applies whenever cash is genuinely on offer, which in practice means short-notice rest day working. If you take cash payment, that payment is added to your gross pay for the relevant period and taxed through PAYE in the normal way, along with National Insurance, exactly like any other pay.

If you instead choose TOIL, no cash payment is made at the time you work the rest day — you simply bank hours to be taken as time off later. Because no payment is made, there's nothing to tax at that point. When you later take the banked time off, you're simply not working during your normal paid hours, so you continue to receive your normal salary for that period as usual — there's no separate payment associated with "using" TOIL, so there's no separate tax event either. In effect, TOIL converts what would have been extra taxed income into extra untaxed time off, which is one of the underlying reasons some officers prefer it, particularly higher earners for whom the value of an extra day off can outweigh the after-tax value of the equivalent cash payment.

Force policy on TOIL limits, expiry, and tracking your balance

Individual forces set their own policies on how much TOIL an officer can accumulate at any one time, and how long banked TOIL remains available before it needs to be used. These limits exist partly for operational reasons — a force doesn't want an unmanageable volume of banked time off sitting unused across its workforce — and partly to encourage officers to actually take the rest they're entitled to rather than perpetually banking time they never get round to using.

Because these limits and expiry rules vary by force, it's genuinely important to know your own force's specific policy: how many hours or days you're permitted to hold in your TOIL balance at once, and what happens if you approach or exceed that cap (some forces require excess to be paid out in cash instead, others require it to be used within a set window).

Given this, it's worth periodically checking your own TOIL balance — most forces provide this through a rostering or HR system that officers can access directly — rather than assuming it's being tracked correctly or relying on memory. Mistakes and discrepancies can happen, particularly across busy periods with lots of rest day working, and it's much easier to query a discrepancy promptly than to try to reconstruct months of rest day working after the fact. It's also worth planning TOIL usage alongside your annual leave for the year, since between the two you may have a significant amount of time off to plan and book, and coordinating the two — rather than treating them as entirely separate pots to be booked at the last minute — tends to make it easier to actually get the time off you want, when you want it.

Planning ahead: booking TOIL and avoiding lost time off

Because TOIL has to be booked and approved much like annual leave, and because it's often subject to the same operational constraints that make certain periods of the year harder to get leave approved — school holidays, major public events, periods of known high demand — it pays to think ahead rather than leaving TOIL bookings to the last minute. Officers who let TOIL accumulate without a plan for using it often find themselves trying to book a large block of time off in a narrow window before an expiry deadline, competing with colleagues doing the same thing and with annual leave requests from the rest of the team, which makes approval harder to secure exactly when needed.

A more reliable approach is to treat your TOIL balance as something to actively manage throughout the year: check it regularly, have a rough sense of when you're likely to want to use it, and put in booking requests reasonably far ahead where your force's system allows, rather than waiting until you're close to an expiry point. If your force operates a cap on how much TOIL can be held at once, it's also worth keeping an eye on how close you are to that cap over a run of rest day working, since some forces will default to cash payment once the cap is reached, which removes your choice in the matter if you'd have preferred to keep banking time off.

It's also worth having a conversation with your line manager if you're building up a large TOIL balance and struggling to find opportunities to take it — most supervisors would rather help you plan sensible windows to use it than see it lapse or convert to a forced cash payment you didn't actually want. Ultimately, rest day working compensation — whether taken as cash or as TOIL — exists to fairly recognise the disruption of working a day that was meant to be yours, and getting the most value from it, in whichever form suits you, is worth the modest extra effort of tracking and planning it properly.

It's also worth discussing TOIL planning with colleagues on your team where relevant, particularly around known busy periods when several people might want to use banked time off around the same dates — coordinating early with your supervisor about who wants what, and when, tends to produce a smoother outcome for everyone than several officers separately submitting competing last-minute requests for the same popular week. A little proactive communication goes a long way toward making sure the flexibility TOIL is meant to offer actually translates into time off you can rely on and plan around with confidence.

Finally, if you're changing roles or transferring to a different force, check what happens to any TOIL balance you're carrying at the point of transfer, since policies on whether banked time off transfers with you, needs to be used beforehand, or is paid out in cash instead can vary, and it's far easier to find this out in advance than to discover after the move that a balance you were relying on has been handled differently than you expected.