Personal days off

What is a personal day?

A personal day is a day off work for a private matter that is neither a vacation nor an illness: closing on a house, a court date, a child's graduation, a religious holiday that is not on the company calendar. Personal days are usually paid and come as a small, fixed number per year, kept apart from vacation days and sick days.

The term is American. No federal law requires personal days, so each employer decides whether to offer them, how many, and what an employee has to say to use one. Some states, such as Illinois and Maine, do require paid leave that employees can use for any reason, which works like a personal day under another name.

In the UK a personal day is not a legal term. Time off for personal reasons there runs through personal leave and, when it is not paid, unpaid leave, each with its own rules.

Personal days vs vacation days, sick days and PTO

What separates the types of leave is what the day is for and how much warning the employer gets.

An employer with a paid time off bank has no separate personal days: the employee takes a PTO day and nobody asks what it is for. A floating holiday looks similar but stands in for a day on the holiday calendar, so it is usually booked ahead instead of used when something comes up.

Under a policy with separate allowances, a sick day is for illness and a personal day is for the rest. An employee who uses a sick day for a house move is breaking the policy, even if the pay is the same. Where state law gives paid leave for any reason, that line disappears for those hours.

Are personal days paid?

Personal days are paid when the employer's policy says so. Federal law does not require it. The U.S. Department of Labor states that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require payment for time not worked, such as personal leave, vacations and sick leave, and that these benefits are a matter of agreement between employer and employee.

Unpaid personal days are allowed as well, with one catch for salaried staff. For an exempt employee, the Department of Labor lists an absence of one or more full days for personal reasons other than sickness or disability among the cases where a deduction from salary is permitted. A partial day is not on that list, so an exempt manager who leaves at noon for a school play takes the afternoon from a paid balance, not from the salary.

For hourly staff the question is a different one: what a "day" is worth when shifts have different lengths. The example further down works that out.

States where paid leave works like a personal day

A few states require employers to give paid leave that employees can use for any reason. Where that applies, the legal minimum and your personal days cover the same ground, and one policy can meet both.

The Illinois Department of Labor says an existing policy satisfies the Act when it gives at least 40 hours of paid leave a year that employees can use for any reason of their choosing. If your personal days or PTO already do that, you do not need a second balance. Other states and several cities have paid sick leave laws with their own list of reasons, so check the rules of the state where the employee works.

Personal days on a shift schedule: a worked example

A hotel in Springfield, Illinois, outside Cook County, gives every employee three paid personal days a year. Its shifts have different lengths: 8 hours at the front desk, 6 hours in housekeeping and 10 hours for the night auditor.

Counted in days, the policy is worth 24 hours to the front desk, 18 hours to housekeeping and 30 hours to the night auditor. Two things are wrong with that. Staff get very different amounts of paid time for the same "three days", and for the full-time staff each total falls short of the 40 hours a year that the Illinois Department of Labor accepts as enough.

The hotel moves the policy from days to hours:

1. Full-time staff get 40 hours of personal time on 1 January, front-loaded as the Illinois rules allow. That is five front-desk shifts or four night-audit shifts.

2. Part-time staff get a prorated share, never less than they would accrue. A housekeeper contracted for 24 hours a week works about 1,250 hours a year, which at 1 hour per 40 hours worked comes to 31 hours; the hotel gives her 32, just over five of her 6-hour shifts.

3. A request comes off the balance at the length of the scheduled shift, in steps of at least two hours, the minimum increment under the Act.

4. New hires wait 90 days before they can use their hours.

5. The request form asks for the date and leaves the reason out, because an Illinois employer may not ask for it.

When the night auditor takes a Thursday off for a court date, 10 hours come off his balance and his shift goes out as an open shift. When a housekeeper leaves two hours early for a parent-teacher conference, two hours come off hers. Because the hours are front-loaded, the hotel does not have to carry unused hours into the next year, and its policy says so.

Can an employer ask why you are taking a personal day?

In most states the policy decides what an employee has to say. Asking for a broad category, such as family, legal, medical, religious or moving, is usually enough to apply the policy the same way for everyone, and it keeps health details out of the schedule notes. Illinois is the exception: under the Paid Leave for All Workers Act an employer may not ask the reason for the leave.

Some reasons move a request onto another track. A serious health condition of the employee or their child, parent or spouse can qualify for unpaid, job-protected leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, up to 12 workweeks in 12 months for eligible employees. Time away that runs to weeks or months is a leave of absence, which has its own rules.

Notice, last-minute requests and saying no

Because no federal law grants personal days, an employer can set a notice period and turn down a request that would leave a shift uncovered, as long as the policy says so and applies to everyone. Maine sets the limit for its earned paid leave: up to four weeks' notice for planned use, while for an emergency, illness or sudden necessity the employee tells the employer as soon as practicable.

A same-day personal day is the hardest kind to cover on a shift team. A workable policy names who can approve one at short notice and what happens to the shift: it goes out as an open shift for colleagues, or the manager calls someone in. A cap on how many people can be off on the busiest days is easier to defend when it is in the policy before the first request comes in.

Do personal days roll over?

Under federal law that is the employer's choice, and many policies grant personal days per calendar year and let unused ones lapse. State law can decide otherwise. Maine requires employers to let employees carry over accrued, unused earned paid leave. California's Labor Commissioner treats a combined PTO bank like vacation, which cannot be forfeited and has to be paid out when employment ends; whether separate personal days fall under that rule depends on how the policy defines them, so check before letting them lapse.

Personal days that build up per hour worked follow the same logic as other accrued leave: the balance grows with each pay period, and the policy says what happens to what is left at the end of the year.

What a personal day policy should settle

A short written policy prevents most disputes about personal days. It answers:

• how many personal days or hours each employee gets, and how part-time staff are prorated;

• whether they are paid, and whether they come out of PTO or on top of it;

• which reasons count, and what the employee has to tell you;

• how much notice a planned day needs, and who approves a same-day request;

• whether unused days roll over, lapse or are paid out, in line with state law;

• how the day shows on the schedule and in the payroll report.

Employers who would rather judge each request than keep a balance use discretionary time off, and those who want one pool without counting days look at flexible time off. Both move the question from how many days are left to who decides.

In Shiftbase a personal day can be an absence type of its own, with an absence policy per contract type, so it never mixes with vacation or sick days. Employees choose the dates and the type of leave in the app and see what comes off their balance before they send the request. Each request reaches the manager checked against the balance, the contract, other time off around those dates and any limit set for busy weeks. Accrual follows contract hours or the hours actually worked, and the absence type decides whether the scheduled shift is removed, kept or opened up for colleagues. Approved days land on the timesheet and go out in the payroll report, which is how absence management keeps personal days apart from the rest of the leave.