How USPS Leave Accrual Works
Career employees earn annual leave by service category: 4 hours per pay period in your first three years (104/year), 6 hours from year 3 through 14 (160/year, thanks to a 10-hour bonus in the final period), and 8 hours at 15 years and beyond (208/year). Sick leave is a flat 4 hours per pay period for everyone, every year, with no cap and no expiration. The calculator above takes your current balances, adds what you’ll earn across the remaining pay periods of the 2026 leave year, subtracts your planned usage, and tells you where you’ll land.
The Carryover Cap and Use-or-Lose
At the end of the leave year you can carry a maximum of 520 hours of annual leave forward if you’re a bargaining unit employee (raised from 440 by MOU), or 640 hours for EAS. Anything above the cap is use-or-lose: schedule it or forfeit it. The math sneaks up on people — a 15-year employee carrying 480 hours who takes no leave will earn 208 more and blow past 520 by fall. The calculator flags exactly how many hours you’re over and how many days of AL that translates to, so you can get requests in before the year-end scramble when everyone else discovers the same problem. Remember the leave year ends in early January, not December 31 — check the pay period calendar for the exact boundary.
Why Sick Leave Is Worth Hoarding
Unused sick leave never expires and converts to service credit when you retire — 2,087 hours equals a full year added to your FERS computation. A 2,000-hour sick leave balance is worth roughly an extra 1% of your high-3, every year, for life. That’s why veterans guard it: burn AL for the long weekend, save SL for when you’re actually sick. The full conversion math is in our sick leave retirement credit guide, and at retirement you can also cash out your annual leave balance — see the annual leave payout guide.
Special Cases
Non-career employees accrue differently: CCAs earn leave after 90 days at a reduced rate, and PSEs accrue 1 hour per 20 paid hours. Extended leave without pay affects both accrual and, if it stretches long enough, your retirement computation — our LWOP impacts guide covers the thresholds. And if you’re converting from CCA to career, your accrual clock works differently than you might expect; the conversion guide has the details. As always, your official balance on LiteBlue or your earnings statement is the source of truth — this tool is for projecting ahead, not auditing the past.