How does the leave year work?

Leave is counted per leave year. An entitlement is granted for one year, a request is drawn from the year its first day off falls in, and every balance on screen is the balance of a single year. Which years those are is one setting for the whole workspace.

Choosing the leave year

1. Open Workspace settings, then the Tracking tab. Owners and co-owners get in.
2. Find the Leave management switch. The leave settings sit underneath it and only appear while it is on.
3. Set Leave year to Calendar year or Hire anniversary.
4. Select Save changes on that card. Every card on the settings screen has its own button and only the one you touched is active.

Calendar year

Everybody renews on 1 January. The 2026 leave year runs from 1 January to 31 December 2026 and is labelled 2026 wherever a year is shown. Nothing else has to be filled in, which is why this is the default.

Hire anniversary

Each person renews on the day they were hired. Somebody hired on 15 March has a leave year running from 15 March to 14 March, labelled 2026-03-15. Somebody hired on 29 February renews on 1 March in the years that do not have one.

Hire dates are optional, so this setting never locks anybody out. A person without a hire date renews on 1 January even while the workspace is set to hire anniversary. Add one on the Employees screen: open the person, fill in Hire date, save.

Where the year shows up

• Leave rights has a Leave year column, and the grant form asks which year the days belong to. Leave it as it is and the current year is used. Grants for the same person, type and year add up.
• A request belongs to the year that contains its first day off. Leave that starts on 30 December and ends in January comes out of the old year in full.
• The balance strip, the request form and Leave insights all read one year at a time. If a number looks wrong, check which year is selected before anything else.

Entitlements granted before leave years existed

Records created before this feature carry no year at all. Leave rights shows them as All years and they count in every year, so nothing anybody was granted went missing when leave years arrived. For the same reason they are never carried over: they already carry themselves, and carrying them again would count the same days twice. To tie one to a year, delete it and grant the days again.

Changing the setting later

Entitlements keep the year they were stamped with when they were granted. A calendar year and an anniversary year are different labels, so a grant made under one mode is not read into the other and balances will move on the day you switch. Switch between leave years rather than in the middle of one, look at Leave insights straight afterwards, and top people up where the numbers changed.

Carrying unused days into the next year and how a balance is worked out both build on this.