PTO Accrual Calculator

Most employers do not hand you a full year of paid time off on January 1. Instead the hours build up a little with every paycheck. This calculator supports the four ways policies usually describe that rate:

• Annual hours: divide the yearly allotment by the number of paydays. 120 hours a year paid biweekly is 120 / 26 = 4.6154 hours per pay period.
• Annual days: multiply days by the length of your workday first. 15 days at 8 hours is the same 120 hours, so the per-period rate is identical.
• Fixed hours per period: the number printed on many pay stubs, such as 6.15 hours per semi-monthly check.
• Hours worked: common for part-time staff and paid sick leave laws. At 1 hour for every 30 hours worked, an 80-hour biweekly period earns 80 / 30 = 2.67 hours.

The projection then adds that rate once per pay period, stops adding while your balance sits at the cap, subtracts the time off you plan to take, and finally applies any year-end carryover limit.

Take the default inputs: 120 hours of PTO a year, paid biweekly, a current balance of 16 hours, 26 pay periods to project, 40 hours of planned time off, a 160 hour cap and a 40 hour year-end carryover limit.

1. Rate: 120 / 26 = 4.6154 hours per pay period.
2. Accrual: 26 x 4.6154 = 120 hours, so the balance climbs from 16 to 136 hours. It never reaches the 160 hour cap, so no hours are lost to it.
3. Planned use: 136 - 40 = 96 hours, which is 96 / 8 = 12 days.
4. Carryover: only 40 of those 96 hours roll into the new year, so 56 hours are forfeited under this policy.

Now lower the cap to 120 hours and keep everything else. The balance reaches 117.54 hours after period 22; period 23 would add 4.6154 but only 2.46 fit under the cap. The remaining three periods credit nothing, so 16 hours are not earned because of the cap and the balance ends at 120 before the 40 hours of planned use.

Note the order the calculator uses: it accrues through every period first, then subtracts planned use at the end, then applies the carryover limit. If you actually take the time off mid-year, your balance drops below a cap sooner and you may earn more than the projection shows, so treat the cap figure as the most you could lose.

An accrual cap (sometimes called a ceiling) limits how large your balance can grow. You do not lose hours you already earned, but you stop earning new ones until you take time off. That is why the schedule shows a period marked as capped: every hour you would have earned after that point is simply never credited, and the calculator reports that total as hours not earned because of the cap.

A carryover limit works at year end. If the policy lets you roll 40 hours into January and you finish the year with 100, the other 60 hours are forfeited. State law matters here. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act does not require employers to offer paid vacation at all, so most rules come from company policy and state law. California, for example, treats earned vacation as wages and does not allow a use-it-or-lose-it forfeiture, although it does allow a reasonable cap on accrual. Several other states require accrued vacation to be paid out at separation. Check your handbook and your state labor department before you count on hours rolling over.

The table divides common annual allotments by each pay frequency, assuming an 8 hour workday. Your pay stub may round these to two decimals.

To read your own result, compare the calculator's per-period rate with your pay stub. If the stub shows a lower number, you may still be in a waiting period, on a lower tier for your years of service, or accruing only on hours actually worked rather than on a fixed schedule.

To see whether you will have enough time saved for a trip, count the paydays between today and your departure and enter that as the number of pay periods, then enter the trip length in hours as planned use. A negative ending balance means you would need your employer to advance hours or approve unpaid leave.

If the schedule shows you reaching the cap well before the end of the window, booking a few days off earlier is effectively free: accrual resumes as soon as your balance drops below the ceiling. The same logic applies before year end when you have more than your carryover limit banked.