PTO Accrual Calculator

How the two accrual models work

Almost every US employer uses one of two methods, and your handbook will say which. Neither is required by federal law: the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require paid vacation at all, so all of this is your employer’s policy plus whatever your state adds.

A fixed amount each pay period. Your annual allowance is divided by the number of pay periods in a year. 80 hours a year on a biweekly schedule is 80 ÷ 26 = 3.0769 hours every payday. You earn the same amount whether you worked 32 hours that fortnight or 48.

A fraction of every hour worked. Your allowance is divided by the hours the policy is based on, which gives an accrual rate: 80 ÷ 2,080 = 0.038462 hours of PTO for each hour worked. Work a full 80-hour fortnight and you earn 3.0769 hours — the same answer by a different route. Work 60 hours and you earn 2.3077.

The difference matters when your hours are not standard. Per-hour accrual pro-rates itself: drop to a three-day week and your accrual falls automatically. Per-period accrual does not, which is why part-time policies normally state a pro-rated allowance instead — work 24 hours against a 40-hour full-time week and an 80-hour allowance is really 48 hours. Some employers give part-timers the full allowance anyway; switch pro-rating off in the form if yours does.

Pro-rating only ever cuts. Enter a 50-hour week against a 40-hour full-time week and the allowance stays at what your handbook says, because no per-period policy pays you extra PTO for working longer. A calculator that scaled it up would hand you 100 hours off the back of an 80-hour policy, which is not a number you could take to anyone.

2,080 is simply 40 hours × 52 weeks, not a legal standard. US federal payroll uses a 2,087-hour divisor instead (OPM, “Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor”), and some employers use 2,088. The 40-hour full-time week is also a convention: federal law does not define full time for benefit purposes, and the ACA employer rules use 30 hours a week (IRS, “Identifying Full-time Employees”). Both figures are editable inputs above for exactly that reason.

A worked example, end to end

You get 120 hours a year, paid every two weeks. Your last stub, dated 8 August 2026, showed 62 hours. The plan year ends 31 December 2026, the policy carries a maximum of 40 hours into next year, you have booked two days (16 hours) in October, your standard day is 8 hours, and you earn $34.50 an hour.

• Per pay period: 120 ÷ 26 = 4.6154 hours.
• Pay periods between 8 August and 31 December: 10 (22 Aug, 5 Sep, 19 Sep, 3 Oct, 17 Oct, 31 Oct, 14 Nov, 28 Nov, 12 Dec, 26 Dec).
• Earned: 4.6154 × 10 = 46.15 hours.
• Balance before time off: 62 + 46.15 = 108.15 hours.
• Less the 16 hours booked: 92.15 hours, or 11.52 days.
• At year end the rollover limit is 40, so 40 hours carry over and 52.15 hours are forfeited — 6.52 days, worth $1,799.31.

That last line is the point of the exercise. Nobody sets out to throw away six and a half days of pay; they just never do the arithmetic until December, when the calendar is already full. Booking 52 more hours off before then costs nothing and saves all of it.

Now add a 100-hour accrual cap. Your balance reaches 100 on the pay period ending 12 December, and from then on you earn nothing — you finish having earned 38.00 hours instead of 46.15. Those 8.15 hours you never earned appear on no stub, are not called a forfeiture, and are invisible to a calculator that only checks the rollover limit.

An accrual cap is not a rollover limit

The two terms get used interchangeably, and they behave completely differently. An accrual cap (sometimes “maximum balance” or “accrual ceiling”) applies continuously: hit it and you stop earning on every pay period until you take time off and drop below it. The loss is silent and open-ended — not an event, but a state you can sit in for months. Employers in states that ban forfeiture often use accrual caps precisely because nothing already earned is being removed.

A rollover limit (or “carryover cap”) applies once, on the last day of your plan year: everything above it disappears, everything below it survives, and until that date it does not touch your accrual at all.

You can have both, and a policy with a 200-hour accrual cap and a 40-hour rollover limit is unremarkable. Modelling them as one number — whichever is smaller, typically — gives the wrong balance on almost every date in the year.

Where free PTO calculators go wrong

• They round the per-period rate before multiplying. 120 ÷ 26 = 4.6153846. Round that to 4.62, multiply by 26, and you appear to earn 120.12 hours a year — more than your allowance. Over a multi-year projection this compounds. Every figure here is computed at full precision and rounded only when it is printed.
• They divide elapsed days by an average period length. 26 biweekly periods is 364 days, so pay dates drift and a twelve-month window can hold 26 or 27 of them depending on where it starts. Counting real dates is the only way to get this right, and it is what the schedule table above does.
• They ignore when you take the time. With an accrual cap in play, a week off in September frees headroom and restarts accrual; the same week in December does not. This tool subtracts planned time off at the end of the window — the conservative case — and says so rather than hiding it.
• They assume a calendar plan year. Plenty of policies reset on your hire anniversary or a fiscal year end. The date is an input here.
• They treat every waiting period the same. “You do not accrue for 90 days” and “you accrue from day one but cannot use it for 90 days” give very different balances. Both options are in the form.
• They convert hours to days with 8. Fine until you are on four tens, a 7.5-hour clinical day, or a 12-hour shift pattern.

What this does not model

It projects one PTO bank under one policy. It does not model separate sick-leave banks governed by state or city ordinances, front-loaded lump-sum grants (enter one as a starting balance instead), tenure tiers that step your accrual up mid-year, unpaid leave that pauses accrual, holidays, payout at termination, or tax. If your projection date falls after your plan year end, it says plainly that it has not applied the rollover cut in between, rather than quietly handing you a number that is too high.

PTO is governed by your employer’s policy and by state law. Use-it-or-lose-it forfeiture is prohibited in California, Colorado, Nebraska and Montana, and some states require payout of accrued PTO when you leave. Check your handbook and your state’s rules.

State positions above are current as of 2026 and change: California (Labor Code §227.3 — CA Division of Labor Standards Enforcement vacation FAQ); Colorado (Colorado Wage Act; Nieto v. Clark’s Market, 2021 CO 48 — Colorado Department of Labor and Employment); Nebraska (Neb. Rev. Stat. §48-1229, Wage Payment and Collection Act); Montana (Wage Payment Act, Mont. Code Ann. §39-3-201 et seq. — Montana Department of Labor and Industry). There is no federal minimum: the FLSA does not require payment for time not worked (US Department of Labor). None of this is legal advice.

What to look up in your handbook

Five phrases decide every number above: the annual allowance and its unit; the accrual method and rate; the maximum accrual or accrual ceiling; the carryover or rollover limit and the date it applies; and the waiting-period wording. Worth asking about before you sign, too — a 15-day policy with a 40-hour rollover limit is worth less than a 12-day policy that carries everything. Put that against the rest of the package in the job offer comparison calculator.