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Know exactly how much PTO you will have — before you book the trip.
PTO accrual is simple arithmetic that almost nobody does: divide the annual allowance by pay periods, walk the balance forward, subtract what you plan to use, and watch the cap. This calculator does that walk for you — fixed annual grants (120 hours a year is 4.62 hours per biweekly check) or per-hours-worked systems like California sick leave (1 hour per 30 worked), with the cap losses and year-end balance spelled out.
Employees use it before booking a trip: will the balance actually cover the dates, or does the trip land two pay periods early? HR and small-business owners use it to sanity-check a PTO policy — how much a 15-day allowance really costs, and where the cap quietly eats accrual.
Divide the annual allowance by the number of pay periods. A 120-hour (15-day) allowance accrues 4.62 hours per biweekly check (120 ÷ 26), 5.00 hours semi-monthly (120 ÷ 24), or 2.31 hours weekly (120 ÷ 52). Employers that front-load skip this entirely — the full grant lands January 1.
You earn a fixed fraction of an hour for every hour worked — California's sick leave floor is 1 hour per 30 worked. A full-time employee (2,080 hours/year) earns 69.3 hours (8.7 days) per year at that rate. This method scales automatically for part-time staff, which is why hourly-workforces use it.
In most states, yes — a reasonable cap stops accrual until you use some. But California, Montana, and Nebraska treat vacation as earned wages: use-it-or-lose-it forfeiture is illegal there, and even caps must be "reasonable" (typically 1.5–1.75× the annual allowance). Example: with a 120-hour allowance, 100 hours banked, and a 120-hour cap, you lose about 100 hours of accrual to the cap over the year if you take no time off.