PTO accrual calculator

In short: PTO accrual per pay period is your yearly allowance divided by your pay periods a year: 80 hours paid biweekly is 80 / 26 = 3.0769 hours a payday. Your balance on a date is your starting balance, plus every payday's accrual up to that date, minus the time off you take, less anything an accrual cap or a carryover limit keeps or takes away.

Last updated 18 October 2026

How to use the PTO accrual calculator

1. Choose how you earn PTO. Most salaried jobs give a yearly allowance (two weeks is 80 hours, or 10 days); hourly jobs often give a rate, such as 1 hour for every 30 hours worked. Pick the one in your handbook and enter its figures.
2. Pick your pay schedule and enter the first day of your first pay period. Weekly and biweekly paydays then fall every 7 or 14 days; semi-monthly accrual is credited on the 15th and the last day of the month, and monthly accrual on the last day.
3. Enter the date you want the balance on, your balance on the start date if you had one, and any time off taken or planned, one line each with its date and amount.
4. Add your policy's limits if it has them: a maximum balance (the accrual cap) and the most that carries over into a new year, which starts on January 1 or on your start date's anniversary.

The result shows the PTO accrual rate per pay period and per year, your balance on the date, and what the cap or the carryover limit cost you. Open "Every entry" to see the balance after each payday and each day off; copy it as text, as CSV for a spreadsheet, or as a link that opens the same figures. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

The PTO accrual rate per pay period

The rate is the yearly allowance divided by the pay periods in a year. A biweekly payroll has 26 pay periods, a weekly one 52, a semi-monthly one 24 and a monthly one 12, so the same PTO is credited in different sized pieces. This PTO accrual chart gives the hours earned per pay period for common allowances:

California's Labor Commissioner works the same arithmetic in its vacation FAQ: two weeks of vacation, 10 days of 8 hours, earned week by week, is “1.538 hours of paid vacation” a week, which is 80 / 52. The federal government uses fixed rates instead: OPM's annual leave fact sheet gives full-time employees 4 hours a biweekly pay period with less than 3 years of service, 6 hours from 3 to 15 years (10 in the last pay period of the year) and 8 hours after 15 years, which is 104, 160 and 208 hours a year.

PTO accrual based on hours worked

Some employers credit PTO for every hour you work rather than per payday, which suits part-time and variable schedules. Choose "By hours worked" and enter the rate and your usual hours a week. At 1 hour for every 30 hours worked, which is California's paid sick leave rate in its paid sick leave FAQ, a 40-hour week earns 1.3333 hours, a biweekly period 2.6667 hours and a full year 69.33 hours. The same FAQ lets an employer cap the accrued sick leave at 80 hours or 10 days, which is what the maximum balance box is for. If your hours change from week to week, run the calculator with your average, or enter each period's credit as a starting balance and move the start date forward.

Accrual cap, carryover and use it or lose it

Take the example in the calculator: 80 hours a year paid biweekly from January 1, 2026, with two days off. The 26 paydays in 2026 credit exactly 80 hours (3.08 and 3.07 in turn, so nothing is lost to rounding), the time off uses 16, and the balance on December 31 is 64 hours. A 40-hour carryover limit then cuts 24 hours on January 1, 2027, and by January 31 the balance is back up to 46.15. That cut is use it or lose it. A maximum balance works differently: with 110 hours already banked and a 120-hour accrual cap, the same rate reaches the cap on Feb 25, 2026, and from then on each payday's 3.0769 hours is simply not earned (76.15 hours over the rest of the period shown) until you take some time off.

The law on this varies by state, and federally there is none: the Department of Labor's vacation leave page says the Fair Labor Standards Act “does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations”, so these are matters of agreement between employer and employee. California is the strictest: its vacation FAQ says a use it or lose it policy “is an illegal policy under California law”, while a cap on vacation accrual is allowed. Federal employees have a carryover ceiling of 30 days (240 hours) for those stationed in the United States, and OPM says any annual leave above it is forfeited if not used by the end of the leave year. Read your own handbook for the numbers to enter.

The same calculation in Excel

With the yearly allowance in B1 and the pay periods a year in B2, the accrual per pay period is =B1/B2, and the PTO earned after the number of paydays in B3 is =ROUND(B1*B3/B2,2), which rounds the running total the way this calculator does. For biweekly pay, the paydays between a start date in B4 and a balance date in B5 are =INT((B5-B4+1)/14). A cap or a carryover limit needs a row per payday, which is what the CSV copy gives you. For the whole method with worked examples, including years with 27 biweekly paydays, read how PTO accrual works. To count the working days a holiday takes out of a stretch of leave, use the business days calculator, and to see what an hourly rate comes to over a year of paid time, the hourly to salary calculator.

Esta calculadora también está en español: calculadora de horas de vacaciones acumuladas.