Vacation schedule template

This sizes a team's vacation schedule before anyone books a day. Enter the people on the team, the paid vacation days each gets a year, the working days in the year, the most people who can be off on the same day, the days each person may carry over, the average daily pay and the length of a typical request, and the page returns the off days the calendar must place, the requests to approve, the people off on an average working day (times ten, so a fraction does not round away), the off-day capacity at your concurrency cap, the headroom left after the allowance is placed, the days the team may carry into next year and what that carryover is worth in pay. A vacation schedule is a calendar with a capacity behind it; these are the figures, from your own team.

The allowance decides the load, and the published figures say what an allowance looks like

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics factsheet for March 2025 found that after one year of service 31 percent of private industry workers with paid vacation received 10 to 14 days, after 5 years 32 percent received 15 to 19 days, and after 20 years 27 percent received 20 to 24 days. The worksheet takes your own allowance, because a team with long service sits at the top of that range and a young team at the bottom, and prints the off days a year the calendar must hold so the schedule is sized against your team rather than a published average.

The concurrency cap is the number that decides whether the schedule works

Twelve people at fifteen days is a hundred and eighty off days to place; at a cap of two people off on any working day the calendar can hold five hundred, so the headroom is comfortable. Raise the headcount or lower the cap and the headroom shrinks to nothing, which is the schedule that ends in August with half the allowance unbooked and everyone wanting December. The page prints the capacity and the headroom so the cap is tested before the year starts, not discovered in it.

The carryover is a cost nobody puts on a balance sheet until the accountant does

Twelve people carrying five days each is sixty days, and at two hundred dollars a day that is twelve thousand dollars of pay the team is owed on the first of January. Whether it is paid out, forfeited or carried is the employer's policy and the state's rule; the Department of Labor page cited below says the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require payment for time not worked, so the policy has to be written and the number has to be known. The page prints it so the policy is decided with the figure in front of it.