Free Excel leave tracker template
An Excel workbook that tracks annual leave, sick days and other time off for a team: log a request and the working days, balances and month view fill themselves in. Free to download, no sign-up.
What's inside
Six sheets, with example rows for the fictional company NovaTech so you can see a filled-in workbook before you clear them out. Template updated ; formulas are unlocked.
| Sheet | What it does |
|---|---|
| Leave log | One row per request: employee, department, leave type, start and end date, half day, status and notes. Leave type, half day and status are dropdowns. The Working days column fills itself in. |
| Balances | One row per person: allowance and days carried over, which you type, then taken, pending, remaining and sick days, which are formulas. |
| Calendar | A month grid with an X for each day of approved leave and weekends shaded. Change the month in cell B1. |
| Holidays | England and Wales bank holidays for 2026 and 2027, from GOV.UK. Replace them with your own list. |
| Settings | The date your leave year starts, and which days of the week are not working days. |
| Lists | The leave types, statuses and half-day options behind the dropdowns. Rename a leave type here. |
Working days use NETWORKDAYS.INTL with the weekend pattern from Settings and
every date on the Holidays sheet, minus half a day when Half day is Yes. Balances use
SUMIFS over approved rows of the leave type that start in the 12 months from
your leave-year start date, so a year starting on 1 April works the same as one starting on
1 January.
How to use it in Excel
- Set your leave year. On Settings, change the start date in B2 to the first day of your leave year. Change the weekend pattern in B3 if your week isn't Monday to Friday: seven digits, Monday first, 1 for a day off.
- Load your holidays. Replace the dates on the Holidays sheet with your country's or region's public holidays.
- Add your people. On Balances, type each person's name, annual allowance and any days carried over from last year. The Calendar picks up the names.
- Log each request. On the leave log, enter the person's name exactly as it appears on Balances, pick the leave type, the dates and the status. Only Approved rows come off the balance.
- Clear the examples. Delete the NovaTech rows on the log and Balances, but keep the formula columns.
A worked example
Greta Vogel works in NovaTech's operations team, gets 25 days of annual leave and carried 2 days over. The log books Monday 6 to Friday 10 July 2026, five working days, and a half day on Friday 24 July, both approved. Her Balances row shows 5.5 taken and 21.5 remaining.
Had she booked Thursday 2 to Wednesday 8 April 2026 from an office in England, the week holds Good Friday (3 April) and Easter Monday (6 April). With both on the Holidays sheet, the log counts 3 working days, not 5. A stale holiday list is the most common way a leave spreadsheet goes wrong.
Adding your country's public holidays
The file ships with England and Wales bank holidays. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own, so do every other country and many regions. Our public holidays by country pages list them for over 60 countries: paste the dates into column A of the Holidays sheet, one per row. To check a count, the working days calculator gives the same answer for any two dates.
Keeping it accurate through the year
- Start a new file each leave year. If your leave year runs April to March, name the files that way, not by calendar year.
- Carry over by hand. At year end, copy each person's remaining days into next year's Carried over column, up to your carry-over limit.
- Pro-rate joiners. Someone who starts halfway through the year gets about half the allowance; work it out once with the annual leave calculator and type it into their allowance.
- Keep sick-leave notes out. Record the dates, not the diagnosis. Health details are special-category data.
Using Google Sheets instead? The
Google Sheets PTO tracker is built for it,
with US federal holidays and plain NETWORKDAYS.
Where the spreadsheet stops working
A spreadsheet only counts what someone types in. It can't do any of these:
- Pro-rated allowances for part-timers and joiners that stay right as people change hours
- Accrual and carry-over that expires on a date
- An approval trail: who asked, who approved, and when
- Several offices, each with its own public holidays
- A limit on how many people in one team can be off at once
That's where an app such as the annual leave tracker or the free vacation tracker takes over. Your people can be imported from a CSV file, so the switch doesn't start from zero.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this Excel leave tracker template free?
- Yes. Download the .xlsx with no sign-up and no email. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and LibreOffice, and every formula is unlocked so you can change it.
- Does the template work out balances by itself?
- Yes. The Balances sheet adds up every approved annual leave row that starts in the leave year set on the Settings sheet and takes it off the allowance plus any days carried over. Pending requests and sick days are counted in their own columns.
- Can I use it for a leave year that starts in April?
- Yes. Change the start date on the Settings sheet to 1 April, or any other date, and the balances count leave starting in the 12 months from it. Keep one file per leave year so last year's rows don't mix in.
- When should I stop using a spreadsheet for leave?
- When you have part-timers on pro-rated allowances, carry-over that expires, more than one office or an approval trail to keep. A spreadsheet can't enforce any of those. Absenca is free for up to 10 people, and you can import your people from a CSV file.
Outgrown the spreadsheet? Absenca is free for 10
Absenca does everything this template can't: accruals, carry-over, pro-rata, approvals, public holidays and a shared calendar. It's free for up to 10 people, and Pro is $37.50 a month for up to 50. Import this spreadsheet via CSV in minutes.