When I first started as a federal employee, I remember each January our front desk would be stocked with leave calendars or leave records. (I’d have never guessed that in 2024 I’d be making my own federal employee leave calendar) These calendars were shipped to our office by GEICO every year. (Did you know that GEICO stands for “Government Employee Insurance Company”?) Apparently, GEICO thought it was good advertising to supply feds with these free calendars for employees to track and plan annual and sick leave.
Get Gov Worker’s 2023 Federal Employee Leave Calendar!Table of Contents
- Why you need the 2024 federal employee leave calendar
- Why 2023 was a special leave year
- How to use the 2024 federal employee leave calendar
- How can I get my copy of the 2024 federal employee leave calendar?
Eventually, GEICO replaced these calendars with Excel spreadsheets. As a spreadsheet geek, I loved planning out my leave and having it automatically calculate all my use or lose leave. Unfortunately, GEICO stopped supporting their federal employee leave record. Each winter, I now manually update all of the federal pay period calendar information into my spreadsheet so I can track my leave for the next year.
This year, I thought it’d be fun to share my 2024 federal employee leave calendar with you. Hopefully, some of you remember the leave record from the “good ole’ days”. But if not, I’ll walk you through the calendar, how it works, and special features.
Why you need the 2024 federal employee leave calendar
I love my leave calendar and check it daily. I look at the spreadsheet and put the hours in daily. Since my workplace uses a “Maxiflex” schedule, I often work a different number of hours each day. Using the spreadsheet allows me to calculate how many hours I have left to work each pay period. Technically I could log into our paycheck program each day to do this, but it’s much easier to just open a Google Sheet.
Planning out my use-or-lose leave
As someone with over 20 years of government service, I get 8 hours of leave a pay period. I also roll over 240 hours of leave each year as part of my emergency fund. As a result I “have to” use 208 hours of vacation time each year.
At the beginning of the year, I go through and mark off all of the school holidays when I need to take off work for childcare. Then I try to figure out the best time to take the remainder of my leave. It’s especially helpful at the end of the year when I need to submit an official request to have my use-or-lose scheduled. I honestly have no idea how I’d handle this without a spreadsheet.
Read More: Parental Leave for Federal Employees
Federal holidays
The 2024 federal leave calendar is also fantastic for figuring how when the federal holidays are. I’ve marked this with a red “H” square. (Just as it used to be on the GEICO sheet for those of you who can remember back that far).
Don’t forget that in 2021 we had another holiday (Juneteenth) added to our list of paid holidays. This 2024 federal leave calendar has the holiday added for you so you don’t even need to worry about which day is the official paid day off.
Sick leave balance
After 19.5 years of federal service, I’ve built up quite a few hours of sick leave. I feel confident that I have enough of a bank to weather a major health crisis and don’t really think about the balance that much. However, sick leave can be valuable if you do make it to your Minimum Retirement Age. Your sick leave balance is counted as extra creditable service.
If you want to know the size of the impact, I built a calculator to help you estimate how unused sick leave will affect your pension.
Read More: Bereavement Leave for Federal Employees
Why 2023 was a special leave year
You may know that OPM calculates salary and benefits using a work year with 2087 years instead of 2080 years as most common employers do. That means that once every 11 years or so, there is a “year” with 27 pay periods. This last happened in 2023, so be careful to copy over the right number in the 2024 tab!
Confused? This Fact Sheet from OPM walks you through the leave years. It includes the last date to schedule use or lose leave and the last day to use your leave.
How to use the 2024 federal employee leave calendar
If you’ve never used this magical calendar before, I’m here to walk you through it!
The first step is to copy over your leave balances from the end of 2023. These go into the highlighted cells in row 8. I’ve pre-populated the amount of earned leave for people with between 3-15 hours of service. If you are a new or seasoned employee, you’ll need to copy in different values into these cells.
Each row in the spreadsheet represents one pay period. The starting and ending dates are in column B. (Note- pay periods start on Sundays and end on Mondays- slightly confusing since most people work Monday-Friday).
You can then enter notes in each cell. For instance if you used 2 hours of sick leave to go to the dentist on Tuesday January 5th, you’d put “S2” in cell E10. These cells are for your own notes and aren’t in any formulas.
To track your leave, you need to also enter a “2” under the sick leave used column (U10). Columns Q-AB contain formulas to calculate your leave.
To find your end of the year leave balances, go to the row that corresponds with the last pay period. Importantly, for Annual Leave, I’ve included a formula in cell S36 that shows whether or not you have use or lose leave to burn before the end of the year.
How can I get my copy of the 2024 federal employee leave calendar?
That’s easy! Just subscribe to my mailing list through the button below. I promise not to spam you or sell your information. (I’d have no idea how to do that if I tried). Once subscribed, look for the welcome email. It will have a link to the Google Sheet so you can start tracking your own leave.
Get Gov Worker’s 2024 Federal Employee Leave Calendar!Still need a 2023 federal employee leave calendar?
Don’t worry, the Google Sheet you download has all previous years I’ve built going back to 2021. So clicking on the download link will give you the 2023 federal employee leave calendar as well.
