Free Annual Leave Planner Template (Excel, Year View)

A request log tells you what people asked for. A planner tells you what the year actually looks like.

Most teams have the first and not the second, which is why the same thing happens every year: leave is approved one request at a time, each decision is perfectly reasonable, and by August it turns out that four of the six people who understand the billing system are away in the same fortnight.

Nobody made a bad call. Nobody could see the shape.

The four tabs, and what each is for

Employees — names, departments, annual allowance, carryover brought in. Everything else derives from this, so fill it first.

Time off log — one row per booking, with dates, type and status. This is your record.

Year at a glance — the planner itself. The grid people actually look at.

Company holidays — pre-filled with the year's public holidays, so they are visible in the planner rather than being remembered.

The split matters. The log is the record; the grid is the view. Trying to make one sheet do both is how planners end up as coloured cells with no underlying data, unable to answer "how many days has Priya taken?" without someone counting squares.

Fill the year in the right order

Booking leave first-come-first-served produces the August problem. This order avoids it:

1. Company holidays. Fixed, and already on their tab.
2. Known busy periods. Year-end close, peak season, launches. Block them before anyone asks.
3. Minimum coverage. How many people must be working. This is a number, not a feeling.
4. Long trips first. Two-week absences constrain the year far more than single days, so place them early.
5. Everything else against the space that remains.

Step 3 is the one most teams skip, and it is the one that makes the rest work. Once you know how many people can be away at once, most requests answer themselves.

The team coverage calculator will do this properly, including the check most teams never run: whether the leave your team is entitled to actually fits inside the leave your team can absorb. Often it does not, and that gap does not resolve itself — it turns into declined requests in December or, worse, into people quietly not taking time they earned.

Carryover is a January problem you create in October

The planner has a carryover column because carryover is the single most common source of year-end chaos.

If your policy caps carryover — say five days — then anyone sitting on twelve days in October has a problem that only gets harder. They cannot take seven days in December without leaving the team short, and if they do not, they lose the time.

The fix is to look in October, not December. A planner makes that check take a minute: scan the balance column, find anyone above the cap, and book something before the calendar decides for them.

The PTO carryover calculator will show exactly what carries and what is lost under your cap. One important caveat it also flags: forfeiting earned time is unenforceable in several states, including California, Colorado, Illinois and Massachusetts, where earned vacation is treated as wages. Where that applies, an accrual cap that pauses earning is the compliant alternative to a use-it-or-lose-it clause. PTO accrual caps covers setting one.

Calendar year or anniversary year

Calendar year wins for spreadsheet-based tracking, almost regardless of the other arguments, because a planner with twelve different reset points is not really a planner any more. If you are set on anniversary years, that is a reasonable moment to stop using a spreadsheet.

Where a planner spreadsheet reaches its limit

A year grid is genuinely useful up to about fifteen people. Past that it fails in specific ways:

1. Nobody looks at it. The planner is only useful if everyone can see it, and a file on a shared drive is not a thing people check before booking flights.
2. The grid and the log disagree. Someone colours a cell without logging the request, or logs a request without colouring. Now two sheets tell different stories and neither is obviously right.
3. Approvals live in email. The planner shows an approved booking with no record of who approved it or when.
4. Balances go stale. They are correct on the day someone updates them and drift from that moment on.

That second failure is the structural one. Any design where the same fact is entered twice will eventually hold two different versions of it.

Related templates

• PTO tracking spreadsheet if you want balances more than a year view
• Vacation tracker in Excel for a lighter version of the same idea
• Employee attendance tracker for who was actually in, rather than who booked what

When the planner stops being the thing everyone checks, uploading it turns the same data into a shared calendar the whole team can see — with the balances keeping themselves up to date, which is the part a spreadsheet cannot do.