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There are a few tutorials on on UICollectionView which you teach you to programmatically create a header/footer view as a subclass of UICollectionReusableView.

I love to use storyboard, so this is a tutorial to provide the steps to adding a header view (footer is similar) to a UICollectionView.

1. Add Header to Storyboard

Select Collection View > Attributes Inspector > Enabled Section Header.

Once that is enabled, a section view will appear, and you can drag your views to it.

Select the header view, and set the Identifier (will be used next).

2. Implement UICollectionViewDataSource method viewForSupplementaryElementOfKind

func collectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView, viewForSupplementaryElementOfKind kind: String, atIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UICollectionReusableView {
    let headerView = collectionView.dequeueReusableSupplementaryViewOfKind(kind, withReuseIdentifier: headerId, forIndexPath: indexPath)
    return headerView
}

In the above method, headerId is the header view identifier you set in storyboard.

3. Set layout header size

Lastly, and this is most often left out by developers, is that you still need to set the header view size in the layout.

Most would have thought that the header view size is that in the storyboard, but sadly, it is not (and the default size is 0)!

layout.headerReferenceSize = CGSizeMake(0, 50);

layout is the custom layout such as a UICollectionViewFlowLayout, which you set to collectionView.collectionViewLayout.