How to Calculate Vacation Accruals (+ Free PTO Calculator)
Charlette has over 10 years of experience in accounting and finance and 2 years of partnering with HR leaders on freelance projects. She uses this extensive experience to answer your questions about payroll.
Jennifer Soper is an HR Specialist and staff writer for Fit Small Business, with over 15 years of experience in accounting, payroll, and human resources.
This article is part of a larger series on How to Do Payroll.
Small businesses that offer paid time off (PTO) must manage vacation accruals accurately—keeping track of how much PTO each employee has earned and when it was used—to avoid labor law violations. Our PTO accrual calculator lets you determine the appropriate accrual rate to use per pay period based on your business workdays, hours in a workweek, and annual vacation days.
Follow our step-by-step instructions for calculating vacation accruals in the following video:
Step 1: Decide How Much PTO to Provide Employees Annually
The first step to calculate PTO accrual is to determine how many days or hours per year you want to grant your employees. According to SHRM, the average number of PTO days granted depends on longevity with the company and ranges from 13 to 26, which may or may not include sick leave. That number reflects the fact that many firms tier their PTO programs—for example, giving new hires less time off, such as only one week off per year, while giving those with more years of service more time off, such as two or three weeks per year.
To keep our math simple, we’ll use an example of two weeks (10 days of PTO per year).
To calculate PTO, this number will be converted to hours by multiplying the number of days provided by the standard hours worked per day.
Here’s the math: two weeks = 10 days x eight hours a day = 80 hours
Step 2: Figure Out Your Standard Hours Worked Per Week
While a 40-hour workweek is pretty standard, not every company has employees who work 40 hours per week. Some companies consider employees who work as few as 25 hours per week to be full-time and grant them PTO and vacation. If you use our calculator above, you can input your business’s actual workweek hours to get a more accurate accrual rate before you process your payroll.
Step 3: Determine Total Annual Work Hours Available
You then have to determine how many weeks per year your business operates so that you can calculate how many work hours per year employees are eligible to accrue PTO annually. This “hours per year” number is used as the denominator when calculating your PTO accrual rate.
The standard available work hours per year used by human resources experts is 2,080. That’s equivalent to the number of weeks per year (52) multiplied by the number of hours the average employee works each year.
Example: ABC Company has a standard 40-hour workweek and is open 52 weeks a year.
Here’s the math: 40 hours x 52 weeks
= 2,080 hours per year
If you grant your employees two weeks of vacation and PTO each year, that would equal (in this example) 80 hours per year. That’s your numerator.
Here’s the math: 80 hours PTO / 2,080 hours per year
= 0.038 hourly PTO accrual rate
What that means is that for every hour worked, the employee in this example would accrue 0.038 hours of PTO. If they worked on average 40 hours a week, or eight hours a day, the accrual rate would be:
Hourly Accrual Rate | 0.038 hours of PTO for each hour worked |
Daily Accrual Rate | 0.304 hours of PTO for each day worked |
Weekly Accrual Rate | 1.52 hours of PTO for each week worked |
To calculate each employee’s PTO accrual rate correctly, you need to provide data for the variables described in the steps above. Your results may differ depending on rounding and how many decimal places are used in your calculation (we rounded to two digits in our examples). However, our calculator above only rounds up the result, not the interim calculations.
Subtract Paid Holidays
If your business provides paid holiday time off, you may want to subtract those days from the total so as not to allow employees to accrue paid time off on days they already are getting paid for as holidays. For example, if you give employees 15 paid holidays a year and consider each day to be worth eight hours, you’ll want to subtract those hours from the total work hours available each year.
Here’s the math: 2,080 work hours per year – (15 days x eight hours a day = 120 hours)
= 1,960 available work hours per year
In this case, your numerator (PTO hours given) would be 80, while your denominator would be 1,960, resulting in a more accurate PTO accrual rate of 0.04 hours of PTO per hour worked.
Step 4: Identify Your Business’ Start Date for Accruals
Our calculator assumes a 365-day year. However, not all businesses start the year at the same point in time. While most small businesses use a calendar year, some use a fiscal year, whereas others use the employee’s hire date. While you don’t need this information for our basic calculator above, you do need it if you want to determine how much PTO or vacation time an employee has earned or taken during a year.
Annual Accrual vs Lump Sum
Most small businesses calculate PTO on a calendar year basis. In fact, if you grant PTO as a lump sum at the start of the year, you wouldn’t need to manage accruals at all. On the calendar, fiscal, or anniversary date, employees would receive their lump sum balance to use throughout the year. You would then merely subtract hours for each day they take off until their PTO or vacation time is used up.
The three most common time frame options for granting and tracking PTO are:
Step 5: Use the Correct Accrual Rate per Cycle
To ensure you calculate employee PTO balances correctly, you have to apply the right accrual rate to the actual payroll processing cycle you use to pay employees. In fact, in some states, the accrual rate information regarding how much PTO and sick leave employees have earned must be printed on each pay stub.
Other Considerations When Calculating PTO & Vacation Accruals
Often, salaried employees are granted a fixed rate of paid time off based on their average workweek—it can be a number of hours or days a year, such as 40 hours a year, or five days off for vacation.
State Laws
Calculating PTO accruals and employee balances requires you to make sure that you consult federal and state labor laws. It also requires a few decisions, such as whether to include sick leave as part of PTO or not.
It’s best practice to track your sick leave accruals and balances separately from PTO available for vacation and other personal reasons. That’s because in some states, sick leave must be paid out upon termination, while PTO doesn’t have to be.
Carry Over
While last year’s PTO balance doesn’t affect this year’s accrual rate, it does affect the starting balance at the beginning of the year (calendar, fiscal, or anniversary), and the total balance of PTO your employee has available. More than three-fourths of companies offering PTO allow employees to roll over some amount.
Did You Know?
In states like California, if you offer PTO, you must allow employees to roll it over, or pay it out upon termination. There’s no “use it or lose it” option allowed.
Part-time Employees vs Full-time Employees
Since hourly employees don’t work fixed or standard hours, you may want to determine their accrual rate per hour worked, rather than providing them a fixed number of hours per year, as an example. Or, you may want to set your accrual rate to match what full-time employees receive, which will end up being less, as they work fewer hours.
Negative Balances
Another consideration when managing PTO accruals is determining whether you’ll allow your employees to have a negative PTO balance. That can happen, for example, if you offer two weeks of PTO a year and an employee wants to use it all in February. You’d need to track the PTO used before it’s been earned, resulting in a negative PTO balance for that worker.
These considerations are important to document in your PTO policy, as well as in your employee handbook, to avoid confusion as well as potential litigation from workers who may feel their PTO isn’t being managed fairly.
How a PTO Vacation Accrual Calculator Works
Like any data tool, a PTO calculator is only as good as the data you key into it. That’s why we encourage you to consider all the variables described in the steps above, in addition to how much time you offer as PTO to your employees. And, consider whether full-time and part-time employees are eligible—and when. Once you determine your PTO accrual rate, you will need to plug that rate into your payroll software or provide it to your payroll service provider.
In fact, the PTO accrual rate serves only one small part in determining how much employees will be able to use. Also included in an employee’s PTO balance is the amount they’ve used, the amount they have (or can roll over), and any amounts you might grant to new hires as a condition of their employment agreement. Here are some examples:
- Negotiated PTO: Perhaps your new hire negotiated an extra week of vacation to accept the job offer. You may need to accrue three weeks of PTO for that employee as opposed to the two weeks everyone else gets.
- Returning employee: Let’s say a great employee moved out of state and then moved back seven months later. You may want to reinstate their unused PTO.
- Employee on leave: When an employee takes parental leave for four months, some companies will allow that employee to retain their employment benefits during the time away from work. This may include PTO accruals as well as health insurance.
Alternatives to Using a Vacation Accrual Calculator
Instead of manually calculating PTO balances, you may want to consider software that does it for you. Whether you choose time and attendance software that provides an accruals feature or a full-service HR/Payroll software, there are many affordable options.
Here are a few software we recommend that can help you manage your PTO accruals.
Software | Best for |
|---|---|
Salaried employee payroll because it tracks PTO and sick leave requirements by state | |
Businesses ready to upgrade to an HR software suite with PTO/vacation tracking included | |
Companies (up to 100 employees) that need scheduling, time tracking, and leave management | |
Restaurants/retailers wanting to track time off and shift swaps for hourly workers | |
Companies wanting to create custom forms to track time off and leave balances |
Bottom Line
A PTO accrual calculator helps you do the complex math required to determine how much PTO and vacation time employees earn each pay period. The data you need to know is how many hours employees are eligible to work each year, how many hours they work on average each week, and how many days, hours, or weeks of vacation time you provide them.
