Checked against gov.uk: 6 September 2026
You don't lose the hours themselves, but your nursery has no legal obligation to stretch them across more weeks of the year, and if they say no, your entitlement defaults back to the standard term-time pattern of 38 weeks a year.
Funded hours aren't really a weekly number, they're an annual total. The universal 15 hours works out at 570 hours a year, and the working parent 30 hours entitlement works out at 1,140 hours a year. The standard way of taking that is 38 weeks a year, term time only, at 15 or 30 hours a week. But the underlying rule allows the same annual total to be spread over up to 52 weeks instead, at fewer hours each week, which is what people mean by stretched funding.
The Department for Education's statutory guidance is explicit that local authorities should enable stretched patterns where there's provider capacity and parental demand, but it stops short of requiring any individual nursery to offer it. There's no requirement that providers must be open for at least 38 weeks of the year, and equally, there's no requirement that a provider open for 52 weeks must spread the funding across all of them if they'd rather deliver it over the standard term-time pattern. Whether to offer stretching is a decision each nursery makes based on its own capacity and business model.
If your nursery won't stretch your hours, you still get the full annual entitlement, 570 or 1,140 hours, you just take it in the standard pattern: full funded hours during term time, and none during the school holidays. If you need year-round childcare, that usually means paying full price during the weeks funded hours don't apply, rather than the nursery being able to reduce your total entitlement or charge you for hours you're actually entitled to.
Since stretching is a provider-level choice, not a parent right, your options are mostly practical rather than a matter of insisting on a rule. Ask your current nursery directly whether stretching is something they'd consider, some will and some won't. If year-round funded hours matter to you, it's worth checking this before you commit to a setting, since switching nurseries later specifically to get stretched funding is more disruptive than confirming it upfront. Your local authority's family information service can also tell you which providers in your area do offer stretched patterns.
None of this changes the total number of funded hours you're entitled to over the year, only how those hours are distributed across the weeks. A nursery declining to stretch your funding isn't reducing your entitlement, it's choosing to deliver it in the standard pattern instead of a spread-out one.
To see what holiday-time childcare actually costs once term-time funded hours run out, the childcare cost calculator lets you model both the standard 38-week pattern and a stretched year, so you can compare the real cost of each.