PTO Tracker

How do you track a PTO balance?

Four numbers give you the balance: what you carried in from last year, what you have earned so far, what you have taken, and what is already approved but not yet taken. Earned so far is the annual allowance divided by the number of accrual periods in the year, multiplied by the periods that have already posted: 15 days accrued biweekly is 15 divided by 26, about 0.577 days per paycheck, so 13 paychecks in you have earned about 7.5 days. Carried in plus earned minus taken is your current balance; subtract what is already approved and you have what you can still book. Two policy limits can take time away from you. An accrual cap stops the balance growing past a threshold, often one and a half to two times the annual allowance, and anything you would have earned above it is simply never credited. A carry-over limit caps what crosses into next year, so a projected year-end balance above that limit is forfeited on December 31 unless you book it or your policy pays it out. Use the calculator for the arithmetic and the downloadable sheet to keep a month-by-month record.

Per-period accrual rates, so you can check the math

Your employer credits time once per accrual period, not continuously. The rate is the annual allowance divided by the number of periods in the year, and that is what makes a mid-year balance look odd: thirteen biweekly periods is halfway through 26, but it is not exactly half the calendar year.

The two ways a policy takes time off you

An accrual cap limits the balance itself. Once you hit it, accrual stops until you use something, and the time you would have earned in between is gone rather than banked. Caps are common where state law makes earned vacation a wage that cannot be forfeited, because capping accrual is lawful in places where forfeiting an accrued balance is not.

A carry-over limit works on one date. Whatever sits above it on December 31 does not cross into the new year. Some policies pay the excess out, some let you request an extension, and many simply delete it. The practical difference matters: a cap costs you time slowly all year, a carry-over limit costs you a lump on one day, and only the second one gives you a deadline to act on.

Whether either is lawful depends on where you work. A handful of states treat accrued vacation as earned wages, which restricts forfeiture and requires payout at separation; most do not. The state-by-state rules are in our payout reference.

What this page does not do

This is a calculator and a spreadsheet, not a tracker that remembers you. Nothing you type is saved, sent anywhere or shared, and there is no account. Reload the page and it is blank again.

That is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature. A single-person sheet works until a second person needs the same week off, a manager needs to approve something, or someone asks what the balance was six months ago. Those are coordination problems, and a spreadsheet answers none of them.

Using the downloadable sheet

The CSV has one row per month with opening balance, earned, taken and closing balance, and the closing balance of each month feeds the opening balance of the next, so you only ever fill in two columns. The year-total row sums what you earned and took, and the final closing balance is what would carry over.

Open it in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. The formulas are plain SUM and arithmetic, so nothing breaks on import. If you track in hours rather than days, switch the unit in the calculator before downloading and the column headers come through labelled in hours.