Unused leave days: seeing them in September, not December
Echipa HR 365 · reviewed 2026-09-04 · 5 min read
The useful moment is the start of September: four months remain, so the days can be scheduled without colliding with public holidays and without emptying the department. In December, the same days become an administrative problem with no good solution for anyone.
The threshold you watch
You do not need a list of everybody. You need the people for whom the arithmetic no longer works. The simple rule: on 1 September, anybody with more days left than there are usable weeks until year end goes on the list.
Who goes on the list, concretely
From 1 September to year end there are roughly 17 weeks. Realistically, a person can take at most one week a month without blocking the team.
- Usable weeks remaining
- 17
- Days they can realistically take (4 months × 5 days)
- 20
- Alert threshold (margin for holidays and peaks)
- 14 days remaining
- Critical threshold (they no longer fit without blocking somebody)
- over 20 days remaining
- On the list go
- everybody with more than 14 days left on 1 September
Nu intră în calcul:
- days already scheduled and approved — those are not “remaining”, they are reserved
- other leave types, which have their own rules and do not compete for the same coverage
Why people do not take leave, in fact
The usual assumption is that they are “dedicated”. In practice the reasons are more concrete and almost all of them can be solved:
| What they say | What it usually means | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| I have nobody to leave it with | A function covered by a single person | Skill transfer, not insistence |
| Things pile up if I go | The workload is sized with no margin for absence | Recalculate the load; it is a planning problem |
| I leave my laptop open anyway | The team culture does not allow disconnecting | The manager has to go first, or nothing changes |
| I am waiting to see how the project goes | Postponement with no deadline | Fix a date now, adjust it if needed |
| I would rather keep them for next year | A personal strategy | Explain the company’s carry-over rules, then they decide |
The September conversation
How it looks, so that it works
- HR — sends each person on the list their own position, with the figure and the days already scheduled — not a shared list
- Manager — talks individually, with the question “what is stopping you”, not “when are you going”
- Manager and employee — fix the periods now, even approximately; a written date is kept far more often than an intention
- HR — rerun the list on 1 November — whoever is still on it has a real problem, not a calendar one
The difference between “when are you going?” and “what is stopping you?” is larger than it looks. The first gets a postponed date; the second gets the reason, and the reason is often something the manager can actually fix.
Managers are first on the list
In almost any company, the people with the most untaken days are the managers. It is not a coincidence and it is not a good sign: a manager who never takes a full week away is also the one who has not built a stand-in. And their team learns, without being told, that they should not go either.
Why it matters, beyond the administrative
A large untaken balance is not only a year-end record-keeping problem. It is also a continuity indicator: it shows exactly which functions the company cannot leave uncovered for even a week. Read that way, the untaken-leave report says more about organisational risk than about people’s discipline.
The second effect is financial and accumulates quietly. Untaken days remain, in most situations, an obligation of the company — so a large year-end balance is a liability growing without anyone tracking it in the meantime. The figure belongs in the monthly report alongside the others, not discovered in December.
What you do so that next year is different
- Planning opens in January, not in May. People who fix their periods early actually take them.
- Everyone sees their own balance permanently, not only when they ask. Visibility alone reduces accumulation.
- Single-holder functions go onto the skill-transfer list at the start of the year, not in August.
- Managers schedule their own leave first and visibly. As long as they do not go, the team does not go.
Where to start
Open the records and count how many people are over the fourteen-day threshold today. If it is fewer than five, it is an individual conversation. If it is more than a quarter of the team, it is a planning problem rather than a discipline one, and it gets fixed in January, not now.
Then look at the top three on the list and check whether they are managers. In most companies they are, which gives you both the cause and the point of intervention.
The last step, the one that changes next year: note the functions for which you found no coverage solution and put them on the first-quarter skill-transfer list.
What do I do about somebody who flatly refuses to take their days?
First check whether it is a refusal or an impossibility — different situations with different solutions. If it is a refusal, the conversation happens at their manager’s level and gets documented; a company cannot force somebody to go in a particular week, but it can show it offered options.
An untaken-leave report, with the threshold you set
The list of people over the threshold generates itself on the date you choose, with already scheduled days subtracted — so the September conversation starts from figures rather than impressions.
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