Vacation calculator

How many vacation days you're entitled to depends on the terms that apply to your employment and the time you've worked during the relevant period.

If you know how many vacation days you're allocated per year, you can work out the proportional amount based on time worked. For example, if you haven't completed a full year yet, you'll have only accrued the portion corresponding to the months or days that have passed.

WorkIO's vacation calculator lets you enter your annual vacation days and the period worked to make this estimate automatically. If you've already taken some days, you can enter those too to find out roughly how many you have left.

To calculate proportional vacation, you first need to know how many vacation days correspond to a full year under the terms that apply to you.

From that figure, you can work out the proportional amount for the time worked. If you've worked the whole annual period, you'd be entitled to the full amount configured. If you've only worked part of the year, the amount accrued will be proportional to that period.

The calculator does this automatically from the data you enter. The result is an estimate: your contract, collective agreement and other circumstances can affect the number of days or how they're counted.

Vacation can be expressed in calendar days or working days, and the two systems count days differently.

Calendar days include every day on the calendar within the relevant period, while working days count only the days you'd normally be scheduled to work.

That's why it's best not to convert a number of calendar days into working days using an improvised equivalence. To use the calculator, select the system your vacation is expressed in and enter the annual figure for that same system.

The calculator uses that setting to make the estimate, but it doesn't determine which system applies to your particular situation.

A simple way to estimate accrued vacation is to divide your annual vacation days by the 12 months of the year.

For example, if you have 30 vacation days a year, the result is 30 ÷ 12 = 2.5 days per month; if your reference were 22 days a year, it would be 22 ÷ 12 ≈ 1.83 days per month.

This approximation is useful for understanding the calculation, but the calculator can use the period worked directly to give a more precise estimate without rounding the days accrued each month beforehand.

If you start working after the year has already begun, you usually don't need to calculate it as if you'd worked the whole year. You can estimate the vacation that corresponds only to the period since you joined.

For example, if your annual vacation is set up for a full year but you start working several months after the period begins, the calculator can use your start date and the end date to estimate the proportional amount you've accrued.

This avoids having to manually convert the time worked into whole months, which is especially useful when you start or finish partway through a month.

To find out how many vacation days you have left, it helps to distinguish between three concepts.

For example, if you've accrued 18 days during the period and already taken 7, that would leave 11 days remaining based on the figures entered.

The calculator does this automatically and shows the time worked, the vacation accrued, the vacation taken and the vacation remaining separately.