The Quick Answer
To track employee leave in South Africa, you need one row per employee and a set of columns for each leave type the law recognises: annual, sick, family responsibility, parental and unpaid. For each type you store an opening balance and the days taken, and a simple formula works out what is left. The trick is getting the entitlements right, because South African leave does not work the way most online templates assume.
The numbers that matter, on a 5-day week
Annual leave accrues at 1.25 days a month, which is 15 working days a year. Sick leave is 30 days across a rolling 36-month cycle, not per year. Family responsibility leave is 3 days a year and does not carry over. Parental leave changed in October 2025 and is now a shared pool. Get those four facts right and your tracker is already ahead of most.
Download the Free Leave Tracker
You get two files: a ready-to-use Excel workbook built as a filterable table - add a person on the next row and the formulas fill in, filter or sort by name or department, and any over-drawn balance turns red automatically - plus a BCEA reference sheet and a printable PDF. Enter your details and both land in your inbox in under a minute.
Prefer to start right now?
Click copy, then paste into cell A1 of a blank Excel or Google Sheets file. The columns, sample rows and balance formulas drop straight in, tab separated, ready to edit.
A good tracker shows every leave type, the opening balance, days taken and what remains, all on one line per employee.
What the BCEA Actually Entitles Staff To
This is the part most templates get wrong. These are the statutory minimums for an employee on a 5-day week, verified for 2026. Your own policy can be more generous, but it can never offer less than this.
| Leave type | Entitlement | The rule people miss |
|---|---|---|
| Annual leave | 21 consecutive days per cycle (15 working days) | Accrues at 1.25 days a month. Untaken leave must be paid out on termination. |
| Sick leave | 30 days per 36-month cycle | It is a 3-year pool, not per year. First 6 months: 1 day per 26 days worked. |
| Family responsibility | 3 days per annual cycle | After 4 months service, 4+ days a week. Does not carry over. Lapses at cycle end. |
| Parental leave | 4 months and 10 days, shared | Changed by the Van Wyk judgment in October 2025. Parents share one pool. |
| Public holidays | 12 paid days a year | Paid if the holiday falls on a day the employee would ordinarily work. |
The parental leave change that breaks old templates
On 3 October 2025 the Constitutional Court confirmed the Van Wyk judgment. The separate categories of maternity and paternity leave fell away. All parents, whether biological, adoptive or through surrogacy, now share a single parental leave pool of four months and ten days. If your tracker still has a column labelled "maternity leave: 4 months", it is out of date. Track parental leave as one shared entitlement. Read the full Constitutional Court judgment.
Every Column, and Why It Is There
A leave tracker fails when it has too few columns to be useful or too many to keep updated. These twelve columns are the practical middle ground. Here is what each one does.
The person. Use a consistent format like surname and initial so sorting and lookups work.
Drives accrual. Someone who started in March has accrued fewer days than someone there since last January.
The balance the employee starts the cycle with. For a full year on a 5-day week this is 15.
Days of annual leave used so far this cycle. You update this number on every approved request.
Calculated, never typed. Opening minus taken. This is the figure the employee actually cares about.
Days of paid sick leave used in the current 36-month cycle. Remember it is a 3-year pool.
Calculated. 30 minus taken, for a standard 5-day-week employee past their first 6 months.
Days used this annual cycle, out of 3. Resets at the start of each cycle.
Calculated. 3 minus taken.
Days drawn from the shared parental pool. Track the agreed split between parents in Notes.
Leave granted without pay. It does not reduce a statutory balance but you still record it for payroll.
Context that protects you later: dates, the reason, who approved it, and any documents on file.
The Formulas That Do the Work
The whole point of a spreadsheet is that the maths happens for you. Type these into the remaining columns and they update the moment you change a "taken" number. They work the same way in Excel and in Google Sheets.
Annual leave remaining
=C2-D2Opening balance in column C minus days taken in column D.
Sick leave remaining
=30-F2Full 36-month entitlement of 30 minus sick days taken in column F.
Family responsibility remaining
=3-H2The annual 3-day entitlement minus days taken in column H.
Accrued annual leave to date
=(DATEDIF(B2,TODAY(),"m"))*1.25Months employed this cycle multiplied by the 1.25 day monthly accrual rate.
Flag a negative balance
=IF(E2<0,"OVER TAKEN","OK")Catches the moment someone has been booked off more leave than they have.
One tip that saves hours
Lock the formula cells once they are in. In Excel, select the remaining columns, then use Format Cells and Protection to lock them, and protect the sheet. In Google Sheets, use Data and Protect range. It stops a well-meaning colleague from typing over a formula and quietly breaking every balance below it.
How to Calculate a Leave Days Payout
Convert the monthly salary to a daily rate - multiply by 12, divide by 52 to get the weekly rate, then divide by 5 working days - and multiply by the untaken days in your tracker. BCEA Section 21 requires this payout whenever employment ends, including resignation.
Worked example
R18,000 a month × 12 ÷ 52 = R4,153.85 a week. ÷ 5 = R830.77 a day. An employee leaving with 9 untaken days is owed 9 × R830.77 = R7,476.92, taxed as normal income under PAYE. The number your tracker shows in the remaining column is the number this calculation stands on - which is why the balance has to be right.
Want it computed for you, with the working shown? Use the free leave payout calculator - it also cross-checks the accrual so the days themselves are defensible.
Build One From Scratch in 6 Steps
Prefer to build your own rather than use the download? Here is the exact process, start to finish. It takes about twenty minutes for a small team.
Add a row for each employee
Put one person per row, with their name and start date. The start date matters because it drives how much annual leave they have accrued so far.
Add the leave-type columns
For annual, sick, family responsibility, parental and unpaid leave, add an opening column and a taken column. For the statutory types, add a remaining column too.
Set the opening balances
Enter each person accrued balance. For a full cycle on a 5-day week that is 15 annual days and 30 sick days. For new starters, prorate the annual figure from their start date.
Drop in the remaining formulas
Use Opening minus Taken in each remaining column. Copy the formula down the whole column so it applies to every employee at once.
Protect the formulas and headers
Lock the remaining columns and the header row so the structure cannot be edited by accident. Only the taken columns should be freely editable.
Update on every approval
The tracker is only as good as its last update. The moment you approve a leave request, add the days to the relevant taken column. Stale data is worse than none.
7 Mistakes That Cost Employers Money
Each of these is common, each is avoidable, and each has cost a South African business a payout or a CCMA finding at some point.
Treating sick leave as an annual allowance
Sick leave is 30 days over a 36-month cycle, not 30 a year. Reset it on the wrong schedule and you either short staff or over-grant. Track the cycle start date per employee.
Forgetting to pay out untaken annual leave
On termination, accrued but untaken annual leave must be paid out. Your tracker should make that final balance obvious so payroll gets it right.
Carrying family responsibility leave over
It does not carry over. Unused family responsibility days lapse at the end of the annual cycle. Carrying them forward inflates the balance and creates disputes.
Using an old maternity leave column
Since October 2025 there is one shared parental leave pool of four months and ten days. A separate maternity column is now legally outdated.
Letting balances go negative without noticing
Without a flag, an employee can be booked off more leave than they have. Add a simple IF formula that shows OVER TAKEN so it never slips through.
Keeping one shared file everyone can edit
When five people can edit the same sheet, no one trusts the numbers. Either lock it down hard or move to software with proper permissions and approval flows.
Not keeping leave records for long enough
Section 31 of the BCEA requires employee records to be kept for three years. A spreadsheet that gets overwritten each year quietly destroys the evidence you may need.
What the Law Requires You to Keep
Leave tracking is not just good admin, it is a legal duty. Section 31 of the BCEA requires every employer to keep a written record of at least each employee name and occupation, the time they worked, the remuneration paid, and their date of birth where relevant. Those records must be kept for three years from the date of the last entry.
Leave records sit at the heart of this. If an employee claims they were never paid out for untaken leave, or that they were refused sick leave they were entitled to, the record is your defence. The catch is that the record has to be credible. An Excel file that anyone can open and change, with no history of who edited what and when, carries far less weight at the CCMA than a dated, permissioned system record.
The evidence test
Ask yourself one question about your current tracker: if a leave dispute landed on your desk tomorrow, could you prove what the balance was on a specific past date, and that it had not been edited since? If the honest answer is no, your record keeping is a liability, not an asset.
Where a Spreadsheet Starts to Break
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good place to start. For a handful of employees it is honestly fine. The problems begin as you grow, and they are predictable.
No self-service
Every leave request and balance query lands on one person. At 20-plus staff, answering "how many days do I have left?" becomes a part-time job in itself.
No approval trail
A spreadsheet records the outcome, not the request, the approval, or who signed off. When a dispute arises, the story is missing.
Accrual drift
Manual accrual is error prone. One missed monthly update across a team and the balances slowly drift away from what people are actually owed.
No payroll link
Untaken leave that should be paid out, or unpaid leave that should be deducted, has to be re-keyed into payroll by hand. Re-keying is where money goes missing.
Version chaos
Tracker_final_v3_USE_THIS.xlsx. You know the file. The moment there are two versions, no one trusts either.
Weak as evidence
Because any cell can be changed after the fact, an editable spreadsheet is the weakest form of record you can bring to a CCMA hearing.
When You Outgrow the Spreadsheet: Synthro
Synthro is HR software built in South Africa, for South African labour law. Leave is one of the things it does best, because it was designed around the BCEA rather than retrofitted from an American product. Employees check their own balances and request leave from their phone. Managers approve in a tap. Balances update themselves, with the correct accrual rules already built in, including the 2025 parental leave change.
Every request, approval and balance change is dated and kept, which gives you the defensible record the BCEA expects and the CCMA respects. And because Synthro connects leave to payroll, the payout and deduction maths stops being a manual re-keying job. NALA, the built-in AI assistant, can answer an employee leave question in plain language without anyone in HR lifting a finger.
16
BCEA leave types tracked automatically
0
Manual accrual updates once it is set up
3 yr+
Dated, tamper-resistant record retention
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I create an employee leave tracker in Excel for South Africa?
Create one row per employee and columns for each BCEA leave type: annual, sick, family responsibility, parental and unpaid. For each type, record the opening balance and the days taken, then use a subtraction formula such as =Opening minus Taken to calculate the remaining balance automatically. Under the BCEA, full-time staff on a 5-day week accrue 15 working days of annual leave a year and 30 sick days per 36-month cycle.
How many annual leave days must I track per employee in South Africa?
The BCEA entitles employees working a 5-day week to 21 consecutive days, which equals 15 working days of paid annual leave per cycle, accruing at 1.25 days per month. Your tracker should show the opening balance, days taken and the remaining balance for each person.
What leave types do I legally need to record?
At a minimum: annual leave, sick leave, family responsibility leave and parental leave, plus any unpaid leave. Section 31 of the BCEA also requires you to keep a record of each employee, including time worked and remuneration, for at least three years.
How do I calculate a leave days payout in South Africa?
Multiply the monthly salary by 12 and divide by 52 for the weekly rate, divide by the working days per week (usually 5) for the daily rate, then multiply by the accrued untaken leave days shown in your tracker. BCEA Section 21 requires this payout on any termination, including resignation, and it is taxed as ordinary income under PAYE.
Is a leave register the same as a leave tracker?
Yes - leave register, leave record, leave log and leave tracker all describe the same document: a per-employee record of leave accrued, taken and remaining for each BCEA leave type. "Register" is the word the BCEA record-keeping provisions echo (Section 31 requires employee records to be kept for three years), so many payroll and audit checklists use it. This template serves all of them.
Is a spreadsheet leave tracker legally sufficient in South Africa?
A spreadsheet can record leave but it cannot enforce BCEA accrual rules, prevent double-booking, or produce a tamper-proof audit trail. If a leave dispute reaches the CCMA, an editable spreadsheet is weak evidence because any cell can be changed after the fact. Dedicated leave software keeps a defensible, dated record.
