PTO Accrual Calculator

How PTO accrual is calculated

Two formulas cover almost every accrual policy in use, and they answer different questions. The first splits a yearly grant across your paydays. The second ties accrual to hours you actually work.

• Per pay period = annual PTO hours divided by pay periods in a year
• Per hour worked = annual PTO hours divided by annual hours worked

Work an example. Your policy grants 80 hours of PTO a year, you are paid biweekly, and you work 40 hours a week. Biweekly pay is 26 checks, so you accrue 80 divided by 26, or 3.08 hours a check. A 40-hour week is 2,080 hours a year, so the per-hour rate is 80 divided by 2,080, or 0.0385 hours of PTO for every hour on the clock. Both figures describe the same 80 hours a year, they just meter it differently.

The period count is where this goes wrong most often. Weekly is 52 checks, biweekly is 26, semi-monthly is 24, monthly is 12. Biweekly and semi-monthly are the pair people collapse into one "twice a month" option, and they are not the same schedule: 80 hours biweekly is 3.08 hours a check, while 80 hours semi-monthly is 3.33. The annual total is identical, the per-check figure is not. The pay frequency converter walks through the difference, including the years when a biweekly payroll throws off a 27th check.

Hours per week matters only under the per-hour method, and that catch is the single most useful thing this calculator shows. Under a flat annual grant, a part-timer at 20 hours a week still accrues 3.08 hours a check. Under a per-hour policy, 20 hours a week is 1,040 hours a year, so the same 0.0385 rate earns 40 hours instead of 80. Your handbook will say which one you are on. Set the method chip to match.

Accrual rates by annual allowance and pay frequency

PTO hours earned per pay period at each common allowance, with the per-hour rate for a full-time 2,080-hour year in the last column. Per-hour rates are shown to four decimals on purpose: 120 divided by 2,080 is 0.0577, and rounding it to 0.06 overstates a full year by nearly five hours.

Per-period figures are rounded to two decimals for display, which is the precision payroll systems use for hours. Employers post the unrounded figure internally and let the pennies of an hour settle over the year, so a stub that reads 3.08 one period and 3.07 the next is normal rather than a mistake.

Accrual caps, carryover limits, and forfeiture

These two limits get used interchangeably in conversation, and they do opposite things.

• An accrual cap is a ceiling on your balance. Hit it and accrual pauses. Use a few hours, drop below the ceiling, and accrual restarts. Nothing is lost.
• A carryover limit is the maximum you can roll into the next accrual year. Anything above it disappears on the first day of the new year. Something is lost.

The calculator models both, and it deliberately never trims a balance that already sits above a cap. If your employer sets a 120-hour cap while you are holding 150, those 150 hours stay: accrual simply stops until you spend your way back under the line.

None of this is federally mandated. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not require paid vacation, holidays, or sick leave at all, and the US Department of Labor calls those benefits a matter of agreement between employer and employee. State law is where the real rules live. California treats earned vacation as wages that vest as they are earned, and its Labor Commissioner calls a policy that forfeits unused vacation by a specified date an illegal policy under California law. That is why California employers reach for accrual caps instead: the same FAQ states that a policy placing a cap or ceiling on vacation pay accruals is permissible. Plenty of other states leave employers far more room. Check your own state labor agency and your handbook, and treat this page as arithmetic rather than legal advice.

When you leave a job, whatever survives these rules turns into money. The PTO payout calculator takes your remaining hours and estimates the cash value after withholding.

Reading accrual off your pay stub

Most stubs carry a leave-balance block near the bottom with three columns: Accrued , Used, and Balance. The per-period figure from this calculator is what should land in the Accrued column each period, and the running balance is what should match the Balance column. If they line up, your policy is being applied the way you read it.

When they drift apart, the list of likely causes is short: a mid-year hire date, so the first period accrued a partial amount; a stretch of unpaid leave, which stops accrual under per-hour policies; a cap that quietly paused accrual while your balance sat at the ceiling; or hours taken that posted in a different period than you remember. Find the first period where the two figures disagree and pull that stub.

On the employer side, someone still has to print those rows. Payslip44 builds the stub itself, with a Leave Balances section that prints Accrued, Used, and Balance rows with fractional hours, alongside reusable employer, employee, and line-item templates and export to PDF, PNG, CSV, or plain text. The math runs on-device at decimal precision, so 26 postings of a biweekly accrual still total the 80 hours your policy promised instead of drifting a hundredth of an hour at a time. If you track dollars period by period too, the YTD earnings calculator applies the same projection to pay.