Know your holiday balance: earned, used and still to come

Themes: App featureHours & pay2 November 2026·4 min read·By David Lawrence

It's early November and someone asks how many holiday days you've got left. You think for a moment. Was it 25 or 27? Did the Friday in March count? What about that half day in June? You end up opening a spreadsheet, or an old email from HR, and doing the sums.

Clockflux has had a holiday balance from the start, and it's free, but we've never written about how it works. This post goes through it, and it's a good time of year to check your own, since we pointed out in the post on holidays that leave years often end on 31 December.

What you tell it

In Settings → Holiday you enter three things:

• your annual allowance, the number of days a full year gives you;
• how your days accrue, either gradually or all at once;
• optionally, the date you started your job, if that was partway through the year.

Everything else is worked out from those and from the days off you mark in the calendar.

Gradual or all at once

Employers handle holiday in one of two ways, and Clockflux handles both.

With gradual accrual you earn one twelfth of your allowance at the end of each calendar month. On 25 days a year that's about 2.08 days a month, so you've earned 12.5 days by the end of June and all 25 by 31 December.

With all at once, the whole year's allowance is yours from 1 January, or from your start date if you joined during the year.

You end up with the same total either way. The difference is how much you can take early in the year, and what happens if you leave before it ends. If you took more days than you've earned so far, the card says how many days ahead of your accrual you are.

A first year that doesn't start in January

If you joined partway through a year, you're only entitled to part of that year's allowance. Clockflux counts the rest of your first month by days and adds the full months after it.

Say you started on 16 March with 25 days a year. Sixteen of March's 31 days are yours, which is 0.52 of a month, and April to December make 9 more. That's 9.52 months out of 12, so 25 × 9.52 ÷ 12 comes to about 19.8 days. The card marks the total as prorated, and from the next year on you get the full allowance.

If you'd like to try other dates, the pro-rata holiday calculator does the same sum, and the guide explains it, including what usually happens to your pay if you leave mid-year.

What counts as a day used

Not every day off comes out of your allowance. In the calendar, Clockflux tells apart four kinds of day off. Only the personal ones, meaning your holiday, count as used. Sick days, public holidays and unpaid leave leave your balance alone, so a bank holiday on a Monday doesn't cost you a day. A half day counts as 0.5.

Days you've already marked for later in the year show as planned and only count as used once their date arrives. So if you book the week between Christmas and New Year in October, your balance today stays the same, and the plan shows up in the next part.

The year-end projection

Under your balance, the Holiday tab adds up the days you've used and the days you've planned, and compares them with your total for the year. You get one of two messages: "3 days to spare", or a warning such as "2 days over by year end".

That warning is the most useful part of the page. It appears in October or November, when you can still move a day to another week, and not in the last week of December when it's too late to do anything about it. A chart of earned and used days over the year shows the same thing as a picture.

What changes with Pro

Two things on this page belong to Clockflux Pro:

• Holiday carryover. On the free plan each calendar year starts afresh and unused days are gone on 1 January. If your employer lets you carry days over, you can turn on carryover in Settings and last year's leftovers are added to this year's balance. The card shows them as "carried over" so you can tell them apart.
• The holiday planner. You sketch the days you have left on a calendar, see straight away what they do to your year-end balance, then book the whole plan, or any single day, in one go. Nothing counts until you book it.

The balance, the accrual modes, the prorated first year and the projection are all free.

Where Clockflux fits in

It keeps the sums for you. Mark each holiday in the calendar as you take it, and your earned, used and available days stay current, with a warning if you're heading over. The details are in the holiday allowance docs.

Your contract and local law have the final word on how many days you get and how they're counted. Clockflux works from the numbers you enter, so check them against your contract once, when you set it up.