PTO accrual calculator

Multiply the per-period accrual by the number of accrual events between the start date and the date you are asking about, on the real calendar for that pay frequency, not a fixed days-per-period guess. At 120 hours a year on a biweekly schedule, that is 4.6154 hrs every accrual event. From Jan 1, 2026 to Jun 30, 2026 that is 12 events, the last one landing on Jun 18, 2026, for a balance of 55.4 hrs with no cap in the way and nothing used yet.

Biweekly is not "every 14 days from whenever you started" once the period runs more than a few months: monthly accrual has to re-derive each date from the original day of the month rather than chaining off the last one, or a start date like the 31st drifts a few days earlier every month, and semimonthly accrual runs on the 15th and the last day of the month regardless of your start date, since that is when semimonthly payroll actually pays.

On the calculator's default policy, 120 hours a year biweekly with a 200-hour cap and no time off taken, the balance first touches the cap on Sep 9, 2027. Every accrual event after that date adds nothing: by Dec 31, 2027 the account has forfeited 40.0 hrs of accrual it would otherwise have banked, on top of the 200.0 hrs it is actually carrying.

Timing the time off changes the number, and this is the part a shortcut gets wrong. Take 40 hours off on the exact day the cap first binds and the room that frees up lets accrual resume immediately: the account closes Dec 31, 2027 at 196.9 hrs instead of 200.0 hrs, having forfeited only 3.1 hrs rather than 40.0 hrs. A calculation that sums every period's accrual, subtracts total usage, and clamps the total to the cap only once at the end cannot tell these two cases apart, because it never checks whether the cap was actually full at the moment the accrual happened.