Human Resource Blog

Prorate Vacation Time

how do I calcultate an employee benefit hours who start date is 9/17/09. vacation accrue at .83 days a month for the first year for a total of 10 days

It is unusual to accrue vacation based on months worked, but we will try to help.

If the employee works until Dec. 31 this year, the employee will have worked all of October, November and December. So she will accrue 3 months x 0.83 days = 2.49 days of vacation, rounded to 2.5 days.

As an employer, you should have a procedure in place for calculating partial months of vacation — this cannot be the first time it has happened. However, if there is no precedent, use this formula: The employee worked 2 weeks in September, or half of the month. So the employee would be entitled to an additional 0.5 x0.83 = 0.415 days of vacation. Added to the 2.5 days, that is 2.49 +0.415 = 2.905, rounded to 2.91 days of vacation.

Assuming that employees work 8-hour days, that is 2.91 x 8.0 = 23.28 hours of vacation. You may want to round this to 23.3 hours of vacation — just short of 3 vacation days.