Free Excel leave tracker template

What's in the template

One row per leave request, with columns for employee, department, leave type, start and end dates, working days, status and notes, plus a row for the annual allowance and remaining balance. The file comes with three example rows for the fictional company NovaTech, so you can see how a filled-in sheet reads before you clear them out. Duplicate the sheet per team or per leave year.

The template's columns and what goes in each

Column	What goes in it
Employee	The person's name, written the same way every time so filters and totals find every row
Department	Their team, so you can filter to one team and see who else is off
Leave type	Annual leave, sick leave, unpaid leave or your own types; keep one spelling per type
Start date and End date	The first and last day off, as dates rather than text, so formulas can count them
Working days	The days the leave uses, without weekends and public holidays
Status	Pending, Approved or Declined; count only approved rows against the allowance
Notes	Anything a manager needs, such as cover arranged; leave out medical details

How to set it up in Excel

1. Download the CSV and save it as a workbook. Open it in Excel and choose File, Save As, Excel Workbook (.xlsx). A CSV keeps no formulas or formatting, so save before you add any.
2. Turn the rows into a table. Select the header and example rows and press Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on a Mac). Each new request then picks up the formulas and filters automatically.
3. Add a Holidays sheet. List your public holidays for the year in column A of a new sheet called Holidays. For the UK, take the dates for your nation from GOV.UK; our public holiday pages list them for other countries.
4. Count working days with a formula. In the Working days column, use =NETWORKDAYS([@[Start date]],[@[End date]],Holidays!A:A). It leaves out Saturdays, Sundays and every date on the Holidays sheet. If your week isn't Monday to Friday, NETWORKDAYS.INTL takes the days off as a pattern.
5. Total what each person has taken. On a summary sheet, one row per person: =SUMIFS(Table1[Working days],Table1[Employee],A2,Table1[Leave type],"Annual leave",Table1[Status],"Approved"), then subtract it from their allowance to get the remaining balance.
6. Share one copy. Keep the file in one shared place and let one person edit it. Two copies emailed around are how two people end up booked for the same week.

In Google Sheets the steps are the same: import the CSV with File, Import, and the NETWORKDAYS and SUMIFS formulas work as written, with ranges such as F2:F200 in place of the table names. There's also a Google Sheets PTO tracker built for it.

A worked example

Greta Vogel works in NovaTech's operations team and gets 25 days of annual leave a year. Her row in the template books Monday 6 to Friday 10 July 2026: five weekdays with no public holiday in them, so the Working days formula returns 5. Once the row says Approved, her summary line shows 5 taken and 20 remaining.

If she had 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 dates on the Holidays sheet, the formula counts 3 working days, not 5. Without them it counts 5 and her balance is two days short, which is the most common mistake in a leave spreadsheet.

Keeping it accurate through the year

• Start a new sheet each leave year. If your leave year runs April to March, name the sheets that way, not by calendar year.
• Carry over by hand. At year end, copy each person's unused days into next year's allowance, up to your carry-over limit.
• Pro-rate joiners. Someone who starts halfway through the year gets roughly half the allowance; work it out once and type it into their allowance cell.
• Update the Holidays sheet every year. Public holidays move, and a stale list miscounts every request that touches one.

Where the spreadsheet stops working

This template is deliberately basic, and that's the point. The moment you need any of the following, a spreadsheet starts costing you more time than it saves:

• Pro-rata allowances for part-timers and mid-year joiners
• Accruals and carry-over rules that update automatically
• An approval trail (who requested, who approved, when)
• Multiple offices, timezones or public-holiday calendars
• A shared, always-current view of who's off, without emailing the file around
• A limit on how many people in one team can be off at once

That's the point where an app such as the annual leave tracker or the free vacation tracker takes over, and your people can be imported from a CSV file, so the switch doesn't start from zero.