PTO is a balance, not a pile: do the projection before you book
Paid time off feels like a fixed allowance — so many days a year — but for most salaried and hourly workers it behaves like a bank account: a little lands every pay period, trips withdraw from it, and the balance on the day you travel is what decides whether the trip is paid. Booking against the year-end total instead of the balance at the time is the classic mistake: the days exist in the annual figure but have not been earned yet when the flights leave. This calculator does the honest projection. Enter what you earn per pay period, how many periods remain this year, your current balance and the hours you already plan to take, and it returns what will actually be left — in hours, and in 8-hour days. At the defaults, earning 3.08 hours per biweekly period with 13 periods left, a 40-hour balance and 24 hours planned, the projection is 56.04 hours — just over 7 working days still free after the planned trip.
The arithmetic, and decoding your own accrual rate
If your employer quotes leave in days per year rather than hours per period, convert once: 15 days of leave is 120 hours a year, which over 26 biweekly periods is about 4.62 hours a period, and over 24 semi-monthly periods exactly 5. The default rate here, 3.08 hours per period across 26 periods, annualises to 80.08 hours — almost exactly 10 days, a common allowance, which makes the defaults a useful yardstick for your own offer. Note the projection's one real assumption: accrual arrives smoothly, period by period. Front-loaded employers, who grant the whole year on January 1, make the “periods left” field moot — enter an accrual of 0 and your current balance does all the work.
Caps, carryover and the use-it-or-lose-it trap
Three policy details can override any projection, and the calculator's note names them because they are where balances quietly evaporate. An accrual cap stops earning at a ceiling — commonly 1.5 or 2 times the annual rate — so a balance projected to keep growing may freeze months earlier than the arithmetic says. A carryover limit caps how much of this year's balance survives into next year, and a use-it-or-lose-it rule deletes the excess outright on a fixed date, often December 31 or a work anniversary. Read the projection on this page as “what the arithmetic says will be left”, then check it against those three rules before promising anyone a holiday: the lowest of the figures is the one you can actually spend. Where a balance would go negative, the tool says so plainly, because discovering an overdrawn PTO balance from a payslip, after the trip, is the worst order to learn it in.
Worked example
Default projection, in full: balance 40 hours, plus 3.08 × 13 periods still to earn = 40.04 hours, minus 24 hours planned, gives 56.04 hours left — 7.005 eight-hour days. The annual rate behind it: 3.08 × 26 = 80.08 hours a year, a fraction over ten working days.
How to use this calculator
- Find your accrual rate — hours of PTO earned per pay period — on a payslip or in your handbook.
- Enter the pay periods per year (26 biweekly, 24 semi-monthly, 12 monthly) and how many remain this year.
- Enter your current balance in hours.
- Enter the hours you already plan to take — a week is 40 hours at 8 hours a day.
- Read the projected hours and days left in the headline and stats, then check them against any cap or carryover rule.
Hours versus days: why the projection speaks both
Employers account in hours because hours are what payroll can divide: a half-day appointment is 4 hours, a long weekend is 8 or 16, and shift workers on 10- or 12-hour days spend their balances at different rates from office staff. Workers think in days because days are what a holiday is made of. The conversion this page uses — days = hours ÷ 8 — fits an 8-hour working day; if your day is 7.5 hours, divide by 7.5 and your projected day count rises a little, and if you work 12-hour shifts it falls by a third. The hours figure never changes, which is why it headlines: hours are the currency, days are just the exchange rate your own schedule sets. Keep one habit from this page — whenever a trip is proposed, run the projection for the trip's own dates, not for December 31 — and a PTO balance will never surprise you again.