FMLA Calculator: Eligibility, Hours, and Your 12-Month Balance (2026)

How is FMLA leave calculated?

FMLA leave is calculated in three steps. First, eligibility: you need 12 months of service with the employer (not necessarily consecutive), 1,250 hours actually worked in the 12 months before the leave starts, and 50 or more employees at your worksite or within 75 miles of it; the employer must also be covered, which for a private company means 50 or more employees on the payroll in 20 or more workweeks. Second, the entitlement: 12 workweeks at your normal schedule, so 480 hours for a 40-hour week, 384 for 32 hours, 450 for 37.5, and 26 weeks for military caregiver leave. Third, the balance: the employer picks one of four 12-month periods, and under the rolling method every hour you take comes back exactly 12 months after the day you took it, while under the calendar, fixed, or forward methods the full 12 weeks return on one date. The calculator runs all three steps. Source: 29 CFR 825.110, 825.200, 825.205.

Who is eligible for FMLA leave?

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act gives an eligible employee up to 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period for a serious health condition, a new child, care for a spouse, parent, or child with a serious health condition, or a military exigency, and up to 26 weeks to care for a seriously injured servicemember. To be eligible you need 12 months of service with the employer, 1,250 hours actually worked in the 12 months before the leave, and a worksite with 50 or more employees within 75 miles. Private employers are covered at 50 or more employees on the payroll in 20 or more workweeks; public agencies and schools are covered at any size. All three employee tests are measured on the day the leave would start, not on the day you ask, so an employee hired 11 months ago who asks in month 11 for leave beginning in month 13 is eligible.

The hours test is the one most often miscounted. Only hours actually worked count under the Fair Labor Standards Act principles the regulation adopts: paid vacation, sick days, holidays, and unpaid leave do not, though hours a returning servicemember would have worked do. A full-time employee on 40 hours clears 1,250 with about 31 working weeks, so the test bites on part-timers, new hires, and people who were themselves on extended leave in the prior year. The worksite test counts everyone on the payroll at the site plus every other site within 75 road miles, including part-timers, and remote employees are counted at the office they report to. A covered employer can therefore have a worksite where nobody is eligible: a company with 58 employees split 44 and 14 across two cities 100 miles apart is covered, and no one at either site passes the 50-within-75-miles test.

How many hours of FMLA leave do you get?

The entitlement is 12 workweeks, and 29 CFR 825.205(b) converts it to hours at the employee's normal schedule, because intermittent and reduced-schedule leave are charged in hours. A 40-hour employee has 480 hours; a 32-hour employee has 384; a nurse on three 12-hour shifts has 432. If the schedule varies, the employer averages the weekly hours over the 12 months before the leave. Overtime that the employee is normally scheduled to work counts toward the schedule, so a mandatory 48-hour week produces 576 hours, and the employer may charge overtime hours the employee misses against the entitlement, but voluntary overtime does not count either way.

Increments matter for intermittent leave. The employer must track FMLA leave in the smallest increment it uses for any other type of leave, and never more than one hour, so a company that lets people take PTO in 15-minute increments has to count FMLA the same way. A two-hour medical appointment costs 2 hours, not a half day. Holidays inside a full week of leave count against the entitlement; a holiday in a week of partial leave does not, unless the employee was scheduled to work it.

How does the rolling 12-month period work?

The regulations let each employer choose one of four ways to define the 12 months in which 12 weeks may be taken, and the choice changes when leave comes back. Under the calendar year, a fixed leave year, or 12 months measured forward from the first day of leave, the full 12 weeks return on one date, and an employee who times two leaves around that date can be away for 24 weeks in a row. Under the rolling method, measured backward from each day leave is used, the entitlement on any given day is 12 weeks minus whatever was used in the previous 12 months, so every hour comes back exactly one year after it was taken and no 12-month span ever contains more than 12 weeks.

The Department of Labor's own example makes the rolling arithmetic concrete: four weeks taken from February 1, four from June 1, and four from December 1 leave nothing available on January 15 of the next year. On February 1 the first February day returns, by the end of February all four February weeks are back, and the June weeks follow in June. The calculator reproduces this: enter the absences, choose rolling, and it lists the restoration dates hour by hour. The employer must apply one method to everyone, disclose it in the rights and responsibilities notice, and give 60 days' written notice before switching; an employer that never chose a method must use the one most favorable to the employee.

What do state laws add to the FMLA?

The FMLA is a floor. 23 of the 51 jurisdictions have their own job-protected family, medical, parental, pregnancy, or adoption leave statute for private employers, some far broader than the federal law: Connecticut covers employers with one employee and employees with three months of service, California covers employers with five and lets you name one designated person a year, Oregon and New Jersey count siblings, grandparents, and anyone whose association is the equivalent of family. Thirteen jurisdictions pay a benefit during leave through a state program, and four of those also run mandatory disability insurance; 21 have a paid sick leave mandate. Where a state law applies alongside the FMLA the two usually run at the same time, but a state statute that excludes the employee's own condition (New Jersey) or pregnancy (California) can protect a second stretch after the federal 12 weeks are gone.

The table lists every state's layer at a glance. Seventeen states, the ones people search for most, have their own page with the state statutes, the paid leave picture, and the calculator preset to that state; the other 34 rows follow in the next two updates. The unpaid federal entitlement is identical on every row, so the state pages spend their words on what differs: thresholds, family circles, how the state law runs with the FMLA, what pays, and the bereavement and sick leave rules.

Using the calculator as HR

The eligibility panel is the first five business days: when an employee gives notice, run the three tests as of the leave start date, and the result is the substance of the eligibility notice, including the reason if a test fails. The entitlement panel fixes the number the designation notice should state, in hours, at the employee's actual schedule. The balance panel is the running ledger: under the rolling method it tells you, for any date, how many hours the employee has and when the next hours return, which is the question intermittent leave generates every month. For a full year of intermittent tracking with notice deadlines, the free spreadsheet tracker (intermittent-fmla-hours-tracker.xlsx) linked below does the same arithmetic in a workbook.

None of this is legal advice, and two limits are worth stating. The 1,250-hour test depends on payroll records of hours actually worked, which for exempt employees the employer often does not keep; the regulation then presumes the hours were worked unless the employer can prove otherwise. And the state statutes have their own clocks (New Jersey's 12 weeks in 24 months, Wisconsin's calendar year, Connecticut's own 12-month method) that the federal balance does not track, so a multi-state employer keeps a second column per statute.

State guides with the calculator preset

Each state page explains the state's job-protected leave statutes, how they run with the FMLA, whether anything pays during the leave, the bereavement and sick leave rules, and the smaller statutes a multi-state employer has to know, with the calculator preset to that state.