Leave Balances

All regular County employees with an FTE of .50 or more earn benefits each month, one of which is the accrual of sick and vacation leave. Regular employees also earn the designated County holidays each year, prorated for FTE. Each September, benefits eligible employees are given 8 hours of Educational Involvement Leave, also prorated for FTE. Additionally, benefits eligible employees receive 96 hours of military leave each calendar year (again, prorated for FTE). The Human Resources Administration Manual addresses the use of the different types of leave. The purpose of this discussion is to address how and when sick leave and annual leave are earned and how to keep up with what those balances are.

The rule that determines whether or not each employee earns benefits for the pay cycle is whether or not they were in paid status half of their FLSA cycle hours, NOT the calendar period of the 16th through the 15th. Each employee is assigned a schedule. Most employees are on Schedule A, which starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday. For those on a weekly schedule, there will either be four, sometimes five, FLSA weeks per pay cycle. This means that the employee would have to be in paid status for either 80 or 100 hours (prorated for FTE) during that cycle in order to earn their benefits for the month, of which leave accrual is one. We do not split weeks. When determining which pay cycle a week belongs to, you always need to look at the week ENDING date. For example, If the week ends on Saturday, the 15th, then the whole week will be in that month's pay cycle. If the week ends on Saturday, the 16th, then the whole week would be in the next pay cycle. Usually the only time this impacts a person's pay is if they have leave without pay, or have overtime they are paid for, or other types of premium pay. Temporary employees and Paramedics are a different story because they are paid by the week. Unlike a salaried employee, their pay will fluctuate from month to month based on the number of FLSA weeks in the cycle. Most regular employees who don't normally work overtime will never see any fluctuations in their pay. There is a detailed list published each year of all of the FLSA schedules and the week ending dates for each pay month.

The next question is - "What is the definition of paid status?"   Paid status means that you have either physically worked at least one half of your scheduled FLSA hours or that between your hours worked and your BEGINNING leave balances for the cycle you had enough hours to equal at least one half of your scheduled hours. Your anticipated leave accruals for the cycle do not count towards this calculation.

If you meet the qualifications to earn your sick and vacation accruals for the cycle, you are eligible to use them at any time during the cycle. Suppose your beginning annual leave balance for the cycle was 32 hours and you expect to earn 8 hours during the cycle. If you had planned a vacation of the first week of the cycle, you can record the full 40 hours vacation on your timesheet for that week.

The weekly timesheets provide employees with space to keep up with their leave balances. It is each employee's responsibility to keep up with his/her own leave balances. If you follow a few simple rules, it is actually quite easy to do.

       1. Look at your most recent check stub. The leave balances at the top are as of the last week of that time cycle. The check stub will show you that week ending date (It states "Leave as of xx/xx/xx). Take the following week's timesheet and record those balances from your check stub as your beginning balances for that week. Add your accruals for the next pay cycle. Subtract any leave used during that week and the ending balance becomes your beginning balance for the next week. Repeat for each week, keeping in mind that you will only be adding accruals once per month.

       2. You will know which week to add your accruals for the next pay cycle because it is ALWAYS the week which contains the 16th.

If you will follow these two simple rules you will always know exactly how much sick leave and annual leave you have. This becomes vital around holiday times as you CANNOT have any leave without pay either the day before the holiday or the day after the holiday, or you do not earn the holiday. Even 5 minutes of overused leave will cause you to not earn the holiday!  I cannot tell you how many times this happens that employees are docked 8 hours (or more) of leave without pay simply because they were careless in keeping up with their leave balances - or never understood how to - and overused their leave around a holiday time.

Without repeating everything in the HR manual, I will highlight a few things here. Employees cannot use sick leave for purposes other than those outlined in the HR manual. In other words, if you want to take a day off to go shopping and have no annual leave or unused holiday but tons of sick leave, you cannot record sick leave on your timesheet, it would be leave without pay. You must exhaust any annual leave and/or holiday balances before you use leave without pay (and sick leave if you are sick). If you overuse sick leave and have annual leave and/or holiday available, the overused sick leave will be converted to annual leave and/or holiday for you.