Best Employee Holiday Trackers for 2026: Free and Paid Options Compared

The first sign your spreadsheet is failing isn’t a wrong formula. It’s discovering two versions of the holiday tracker with different data. One manager approved Sarah’s request on Monday. Another manager was editing a separate copy. Now Sarah’s balance shows 12 days in one version and 10 in the other, and nobody can tell which is correct.

For teams under 10, this rarely happens. A single spreadsheet with one person maintaining it can work for years. The breaking point is version control, and it usually arrives somewhere between 10 and 50 employees, when multiple managers need to approve time off and everyone edits the same shared document.

From there, the problems compound. Payroll disconnects are the obvious one: when leave data lives in a spreadsheet and payroll runs from a separate system, someone has to reconcile the two before every pay cycle. Miss one sick day or miscalculate a carryover, and you’re correcting someone’s pay after the fact. Then there’s compliance: if you manage a UK team, from April 2026 you must retain holiday records for at least six years, and spreadsheets have no audit trail. And overlap blindness creeps in quietly: two people from the same team book the same week off, and nobody notices until both are already gone.

This guide compares 10 employee holiday trackers, from free tools for small teams to full HR platforms for growing businesses. Every price and feature listed here was verified against the vendor’s website in September 2026. If you manage UK employees, there’s a dedicated section covering statutory holiday entitlement, the April 2026 carryover rules, and the Bradford Factor.

Quick comparison: 10 employee holiday trackers at a glance

Free employee holiday trackers

1. actiPLANS

Pricing: Free (up to 3 users), $1.50/user/month Standard, $1.20/user/month Growth (41 to 200 users), $270/month Enterprise (unlimited users). Annual billing. 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

actiPLANS is a leave management system for teams that have outgrown spreadsheets but don’t need an enterprise HR suite. You can create unlimited custom leave types rather than working within a fixed set of categories. The approval workflow supports multiple approvers per team, and PTO blackout dates let you block requests during peak business periods. An overlap prevention feature flags scheduling conflicts before they reach the approval stage, so two people on the same team don’t accidentally book the same week off.

Automated accruals on paid plans handle weekly, biweekly, or monthly accumulation rules, including caps and yearly resets. The visual team timeline shows who is off and when across the entire organization, filtered by department or location. Calendar sync works through iCal, pushing data into Google Calendar or Outlook. Mobile apps for iOS and Android let employees submit requests, check balances, and review team availability from their phones.

One thing to know: PTO balances update when leave is actually taken, not when it’s approved. The free plan also excludes PTO balance tracking and work scheduling, so teams that need accrual calculations will need a paid tier. At $1.50 per user per month, actiPLANS is one of the least expensive options in this list with full accrual support.

Start a free 30-day trial with full access to all features. See full pricing.

2. StaffLeave

Pricing: Free forever (unlimited users, mobile app), £1/user/month Plus Pack (desktop + advanced features). Monthly billing, no contract.

StaffLeave is the only option in this list with a genuinely free plan for unlimited users. The free tier runs on iOS and Android, making it practical for teams where most leave requests happen from phones. You get request approval, booking on behalf of employees, TOIL tracking, and live calendar export feeds without paying anything.

The paid Plus Pack at £1 per user per month adds a desktop wall planner, full leave history without lookback limits, audit trails, and basic reporting. It also lets you book leave for future years and block public holidays from being bookable.

The product is deliberately simple. There’s no broader HR functionality, no performance reviews, no onboarding tools. If you need something that replaces a shared Google Calendar without the complexity of a full HR platform, StaffLeave fills that gap. For UK teams concerned about the April 2026 record retention requirement, the Plus Pack’s audit trail provides the documented history of requests, approvals, and changes that a spreadsheet cannot.

StaffLeave supports GBP, USD, EUR, CAD, and AUD billing, though its primary audience is UK businesses. The product is built around mobile, so the desktop experience is the add-on, not the default. Teams that work primarily from computers may find the free tier limiting.

3. LeaveBoard

Pricing: Free (up to 9 employees), $1.35/user/month Pro (annual billing, ~$1.63 monthly), Enterprise custom (81+ employees). 14-day Pro trial.

LeaveBoard offers a free plan for up to nine employees with an HR dashboard, absence calendar, leave policies, and basic reporting included. The Pro plan at $1.35 per user per month (annual billing) adds unlimited users, advanced reporting, and further customization.

The biggest draw is international coverage. LeaveBoard imports public holidays from over 50 countries, which saves significant setup time for teams with employees across multiple locations. The dynamic entitlement calculator adjusts balances automatically based on working hours and company rules, and overlap warnings flag conflicts when multiple staff request the same dates.

One gap to note: there’s no dedicated mobile app. The web interface is responsive and works on phones, but there’s no native iOS or Android application. For teams where managers mainly use desktop computers, this is not a problem. For teams that need quick mobile approvals throughout the day, test the responsive experience before committing.

LeaveBoard integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, and Microsoft Office 365 for calendar sync. Slack integration is also available. Leave reports export as XLS or CSV for payroll reconciliation, though there’s no direct payroll software connection.

4. Day Off

Pricing: Free (up to 10 users), $2/user/month Pro. No contract.

Day Off is a PTO tracker that does one thing and keeps it simple. The free plan covers up to 10 users, making it the most generous free tier by headcount among the standalone trackers here. The Pro plan at $2 per user per month removes the cap and adds additional features.

The app works on iOS, Android, and web, with Slack integration for leave notifications. It’s built for teams that want to replace a spreadsheet with something cleaner, not teams looking for compliance analytics or complex accrual rules. There’s no Bradford Factor scoring, no TOIL tracking, and no tiered accrual automation.

What makes Day Off worth considering is adoption speed. Setup takes minutes: add your team, configure leave types, and start approving requests. No lengthy onboarding, no approval workflow design, no training period. For a startup with 5 to 10 employees that just needs to track who is off and when, that simplicity is the point.

You give up reporting depth and no calendar sync beyond basic exports. Teams that need payroll data exports or detailed audit trails will outgrow Day Off quickly. But for small teams replacing a shared spreadsheet or Slack channel with an actual tracker, it’s a genuine upgrade at no cost.

Best value paid holiday trackers

5. WhosOff

Pricing: From £0.95/user/month (volume discounts for larger teams). No free plan. 8-week free trial, no credit card, no automatic conversion to paid.

WhosOff has the deepest integration set among the dedicated holiday trackers in this list. Slack, Microsoft Teams, SSO via SAML 2.0 (Azure AD, Okta, Auth0, OneLogin, Google Workspace, JumpCloud), a RESTful API, and webhooks are all included at no extra cost. The rate per user starts at £0.95 and drops further as your team grows.

For UK businesses, WhosOff includes Bradford Factor absence analytics, which scores employee absence patterns to flag frequent short absences. Overtime and TOIL management, carryover limits, and year-end rollover tools cover the operational compliance requirements that simpler trackers skip entirely.

The 8-week free trial is the longest in this list, giving teams two full months to evaluate the product before spending anything. The trial doesn’t automatically convert to a paid subscription.

Beyond holiday tracking, WhosOff includes a Staff Hub for employee records, salary history, and training certifications. Document storage is available as an optional add-on. The platform is Cyber Essentials certified and sits on the Crown Commercial Service framework, which matters for UK public sector organizations with procurement requirements.

Mobile apps are free for all users on iOS and Android. Monthly billing with no contract keeps the exit cost low if the product doesn’t work out.

6. Timetastic

Pricing: $1.50/user/month Business, $2.50/user/month Pro (adds accruals). No free plan.

Timetastic is one of the most recognized staff holiday planners in the UK. The wallchart view gives managers a visual overview of team absences across departments, with leave types shown in color codes and configurable limits on how many people from the same department can be off simultaneously.

The Business plan at $1.50 per user per month covers leave requests, approvals, the wallchart, and public holiday calendars for over 3,000 locations worldwide. The Pro plan at $2.50 per user per month adds automated accrual calculations. If your team needs accruals and you’re comparing Timetastic against tools that include them at their base price, factor in the Pro cost.

Public holiday support is a real strength. You can assign calendars for specific countries to individual employees, which works well for distributed teams where some staff follow UK bank holidays while others follow US federal holidays or EU public holiday schedules.

The core workflow is straightforward: employees request time off, managers approve or decline, and the wallchart updates in real time. Where Timetastic is lighter than some alternatives is integrations. There’s no Slack or Microsoft Teams plugin, and calendar sync goes through iCal rather than direct API connections. For teams that rely on Slack notifications for leave requests, that’s a genuine gap.

7. The Holiday Tracker

Pricing: £1.75/user/month, everything included. Monthly billing, no contract, no notice period, no extra charges. 20% off for registered charities. 7-day free trial.

The Holiday Tracker has the simplest pricing model here: £1.75 per user per month, one tier, every feature available. No plan comparison needed. That directness extends to the product itself.

Bradford Factor scoring, sickness heatmaps, automatic holiday entitlement calculations (including recalculations when an employee changes from full time to part time), team calendars, and reporting ready for payroll export are all included. The sickness heatmap visualizes absence patterns across the organization, making it easier to spot trends that individual Bradford Factor scores might not surface on their own.

Automatic entitlement calculations handle starters joining partway through the leave year, workers on reduced hours, and changes in contracted days. This addresses a specific compliance challenge that UK businesses struggle with manually: calculating the correct holiday balance when someone joins in July or drops from five days per week to three.

A weekly “Who’s Off” email summary goes out to managers with upcoming absences and employee birthdays. Data is hosted with Microsoft in the UK, and support is UK phone and email, Monday to Friday.

The limitations are about integrations. There’s no Slack or Teams connection and no API access. The Holiday Tracker does what it does well, but it’s a standalone product that won’t plug into a broader toolchain.

HR platforms with holiday management

If your team will need onboarding, performance reviews, or payroll within the next year, starting with an HR platform that includes holiday tracking saves you from migrating later. You pay more and commit to longer contracts, but you avoid switching tools six months from now.

8. CharlieHR

Pricing: Band pricing (not per user). 10 to 14 employees: £47/month (~£3.36 to £4.70 per person). 250+ employees: £754/month (~£3.02 per person). 7-day trial, no credit card. Prices exclude VAT.

CharlieHR is a UK HR platform for small businesses that bundles leave management with onboarding, performance reviews, and employee engagement surveys. If you know you’ll need HR software beyond holiday tracking within the next 12 months, starting here avoids a migration.

The leave features are solid for a bundled product. A shared company calendar with team and department filters shows a seven-day absence snapshot. Overlap notifications flag scheduling clashes before approval. Custom leave types cover TOIL, study days, mental health days, and sensitive leave categories hidden from the wider team. Automatic carryover calculations, new starter pro-rating, and expiry dates for TOIL balances handle UK compliance without manual adjustments.

Pricing uses flat monthly bands rather than rates per user, which rewards teams in certain size brackets. A team of 10 to 14 pays the same £47 per month as a team of 5 to 9, making the 10-person range the most efficient price point on the curve. A Slack integration sends morning updates to team channels listing daily absences, birthdays, and work anniversaries.

Note the promotional pricing for very small teams: £5 per month for 1 to 4 employees applies for the first six months only, after which it increases to £21 per month.

9. BrightHR

Pricing: From £3/user/month (large teams, per FAQ). £16.67/user/month shown online (5 employees, 36-month contract). No free plan, no free trial (demo available). 24, 36, or 60-month fixed contracts. Prices exclude tax.

BrightHR is the most expensive option in this list, but it’s also the only one with native payroll. If your main frustration is reconciling leave data with a separate payroll system before every pay run, BrightHR removes that step entirely.

Beyond holiday planning, the platform includes shift and rota management, overtime tracking, expense tracking, time and attendance clocking, document storage, and custom reporting. The Enhanced tier adds 24/7 employment law advice from qualified advisors. The Full tier adds health and safety software and an employee assistance programme.

The pricing structure requires careful reading. The £16.67 per user figure shown online assumes five employees on a 36-month contract. The FAQ mentions prices starting from £3 per person, which implies significant volume discounts for larger teams. All plans require a fixed contract: the shortest available option is 24 months.

That long contract commitment is the main consideration. Most dedicated holiday trackers in this list bill monthly with no lock-in, so teams can switch if the tool doesn’t fit. BrightHR’s 24-month minimum means you need to be confident the platform works for your team before signing. Ask for the full pricing schedule for your headcount during the demo.

10. Personio

Pricing: From €7.60/employee/month (actual price depends on a custom quote). 10% discount for annual upfront payment. 14-day free trial, no credit card. 12-month minimum contract. One-time setup fee (undisclosed).

Personio is a European HR platform built for businesses with 10 to 10,000 employees. Leave management is included in both its Core and CorePro plans at no additional cost, alongside employee profiles, salary management, document handling, and workflow automation.

Personio justifies the higher price with breadth. Over 200 integrations cover Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Calendar, Zapier, Xero, and SSO providers. The platform operates across multiple European markets with localized compliance for GDPR, works councils, and employment rules specific to each country. If you manage teams in the UK, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, Personio handles the varying statutory leave requirements across all four.

Absence management includes employee requests, one click approval, automatic balance calculations, a team absence calendar, sick leave reporting, and mobile app access. Over 16,000 companies use Personio, including UK customers such as Lush and British Rowing.

The pricing needs a demo call to pin down. The published €7.60 per employee per month is a starting floor, not a fixed price. Add the one-time setup fee and the 12-month contract minimum, and the total cost of ownership is substantially higher than any dedicated holiday tracker. For teams under 50, a tool like actiPLANS or WhosOff covers the holiday tracking need at a fraction of the cost. Personio makes sense when you need the broader HR platform, not just leave management.

How to choose an employee holiday tracker

Feature lists tell you what a tool can do. They don’t tell you whether it solves your actual problem. Here’s what to evaluate based on the frustrations HR teams and business owners describe most often.

Start with payroll

Practitioners consistently rank payroll integration as the single most important feature in leave management software. The fear is simple: leave data and payroll data become disconnected. When a holiday tracker shows 10 remaining days but payroll has a different figure because someone forgot to export last month’s data, you get pay errors and employee complaints.

Of the tools in this list, only BrightHR has native payroll. Everyone else exports leave data as CSV or XLS files for manual import into your payroll system. For teams under 50, that export workflow is manageable. Above 50, monthly reconciliation becomes a real burden. If you absolutely need payroll sync and don’t want BrightHR’s long contract, check whether your existing payroll provider has a leave management module that keeps everything in one system.

Overlap detection matters more than you think

The hardest operational problem managers face with holiday management is not tracking balances. It’s handling competing requests during peak periods: school holidays, Christmas, summer bank holiday weeks. A tool that shows only individual balances doesn’t help you see that three people from the same team all plan to be away the same week.

Look for team calendar views with department filters and conflict warnings that fire before approval, not after. actiPLANS, LeaveBoard, WhosOff, CharlieHR, and The Holiday Tracker all include overlap prevention or conflict notifications. Some tools only show the clash after you’ve already approved a request, which defeats the purpose entirely.

UK compliance features

If you manage UK employees, three requirements should influence your choice:

• The 28-day statutory minimum: your tool needs to calculate entitlements correctly for workers on reduced hours and for employees who join partway through the leave year.
• The April 2026 carryover rules: employers must retain holiday records for at least six years with full audit trails.
• Bradford Factor scoring: if your organization uses it (and many UK businesses do), only WhosOff and The Holiday Tracker include it in this list.

More detail on all three is in the UK compliance section below.

Match the tool to your team size

For teams under 10: StaffLeave (unlimited free users) or Day Off (free for 10) give you a proper tracker at no cost. The upgrade from a spreadsheet is immediate and the risk is zero.

For 10 to 50 employees: actiPLANS, LeaveBoard, WhosOff, Timetastic, or The Holiday Tracker are all priced under £2 per user per month with the compliance and reporting features this size bracket needs.

For 50 to 200 employees: CharlieHR or BrightHR bundle leave management with broader HR tools that growing teams will need eventually. The cost per user improves at this scale.

For 200+ employees across multiple countries: Personio handles statutory requirements across several jurisdictions and integrates with the enterprise tools (SSO, Slack, Xero) that larger organizations already run.

Don’t overbuy

Teams of 10 to 90 employees are the most underserved group: too large for spreadsheets, too small to justify enterprise HR software pricing and long contracts. If a vendor requires a demo call to see pricing, insists on a 24 month commitment, or won’t publish rates on their website, that vendor may not be designed for your size. Start with transparent pricing and a genuine free trial. You can always migrate later.

UK holiday compliance: what employers need to know

If you manage employees in the UK, holiday entitlement is governed by the Working Time Regulations 1998 and subsequent amendments. Here’s what your employee holiday tracker needs to handle correctly.

Statutory minimum: 5.6 weeks (28 days)

Every UK worker is entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave per year. For a full-time employee working five days per week, that’s 28 days. This figure can include bank holidays, so an employer offering 20 days of annual leave plus 8 bank holidays meets the statutory minimum exactly.

Workers on reduced hours receive a proportional entitlement. An employee working three days per week is entitled to 3 × 5.6 = 16.8 days. Your holiday tracker should calculate this automatically and recalculate when contracted hours change.

Employees who join partway through the leave year receive a portion of the annual entitlement based on the remaining months. Someone starting on 1 July with a January to December leave year gets 6/12 of their full entitlement. For workers on variable or zero hours contracts, the standard calculation is 12.07% of hours worked (5.6 weeks divided by 46.4 working weeks in a year).

The April 2026 carryover and record-keeping rules

From 6 April 2026, UK employers must retain annual leave records for at least six years. The records must cover:

• Holiday taken, including specific dates
• Remaining balances at year end
• Carryover amounts with the reasons for carrying over
• Holiday pay calculations
• Manager approvals of leave requests
• Refused requests with the alternative dates offered

A “use it or lose it” policy alone is legally insufficient. Employers must also demonstrate that they reminded employees to book their remaining entitlement, provided genuine opportunities to take it, and warned about expiry before the leave year ended. Employers must also separately track statutory leave (4 weeks plus 1.6 weeks under UK regulations) versus contractual leave, since different carryover rules apply to each.

This is where spreadsheets fail most visibly. A shared Google Sheet has no audit trail, no version history that’s legally defensible, and no way to prove that a reminder was sent on a specific date. An employment tribunal asking for six years of leave approval records will not accept a spreadsheet that’s been edited by multiple managers with no change log.

The Bradford Factor: what it scores and when it breaks

The Bradford Factor is a formula UK businesses use to identify disruptive absence patterns:

B = S² × D

Where S is the number of separate absence spells and D is the total number of days absent.

Here’s what the scores look like in practice. All three employees below missed 10 total days:

Same total days off. Scores ranging from 10 to 1,000. The formula penalizes frequent short absences more heavily than single long ones because, operationally, many scattered absences cause more disruption than one planned absence with handover.

Common trigger thresholds:

• Below 50: No action needed
• 50 to 124: Informal conversation with the employee
• 125 to 399: Formal review meeting
• 400 and above: Potential disciplinary process

One thing to watch: applying Bradford Factor scores rigidly can violate the Equality Act 2010 if it disproportionately affects employees with disabilities or chronic conditions that cause intermittent absences. HR advisors recommend treating the score as a trigger for investigation, not an automatic disciplinary mechanism. Any employee holiday tracker that includes Bradford Factor scoring should also support exemptions and manual overrides for reasonable adjustments.

In this list, WhosOff and The Holiday Tracker include Bradford Factor calculations. Both allow managers to use the score as one data point among several rather than an automated decision.

Frequently asked questions

How do I track employee holidays?

The three common approaches are spreadsheets, standalone holiday tracking software, and the leave module inside a broader HR platform. Spreadsheets work for teams under 10 with a single person managing the file. Beyond that, version control problems and compliance gaps make dedicated software a better option. The tools in this guide range from free options covering 3 to 10 users up to enterprise platforms supporting thousands of employees.

What is the best free employee holiday tracker?

It depends on team size. StaffLeave is free for unlimited users but the free tier works only on mobile. Day Off is free for up to 10 users with a web and mobile app. LeaveBoard covers up to 9 users with a web dashboard and absence calendar. actiPLANS is free for up to 3 users with desktop and mobile access plus a 30-day trial of paid features including automated accruals.

When should I switch from spreadsheets to software?

The trigger is usually version control, not formula errors. When two managers edit different copies of a leave tracker and the data diverges, you have a problem that formatting cannot fix. Other signals: your team exceeds 10 people and scheduling conflicts go unnoticed, you need an audit trail for UK compliance requirements, or you spend more than an hour each month reconciling leave data with payroll.

What is the Bradford Factor?

A formula (B = S² × D) that scores employee absence patterns. S is the number of separate absence spells and D is the total days absent. It penalizes frequent short absences more heavily than single long ones. UK businesses use it to identify patterns worth a managerial conversation. It should be used as a discussion trigger, not an automatic disciplinary mechanism, because rigid application can breach the Equality Act 2010 for employees with protected characteristics.

How do you manage competing holiday requests?

Set a clear policy: first come, first served allocation, minimum staffing levels per department, and notice periods proportional to the leave duration requested. Use a staff holiday planner with team calendar views and overlap prevention. The tools that handle this best display real-time team availability before a request is submitted, so employees can see if their preferred dates conflict with already-approved time off before they ask.

How much holiday are UK employees entitled to?

The statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave per year. For a full-time employee working five days per week, that’s 28 days including bank holidays. Part-time workers receive a proportional entitlement: an employee working three days per week gets 16.8 days. Employers may offer more than the statutory minimum as part of the employment contract, but they cannot offer less.

Do employee holiday trackers integrate with payroll?

Most standalone trackers export leave data as CSV or XLS files for manual import into payroll software. BrightHR is the only tool in this list with native payroll. For the other nine, the export process adds a manual step to each payroll cycle. If payroll integration is your primary requirement, either choose BrightHR or check whether your existing payroll provider has a leave management module that keeps everything in one system.

Is there a free PTO tracker?

Yes. StaffLeave is free for unlimited users (mobile app only). Day Off is free for up to 10 users. LeaveBoard is free for up to 9 users. actiPLANS is free for up to 3 users. Each has limitations on the free tier: StaffLeave lacks desktop access, Day Off has limited reporting, LeaveBoard has no native mobile app, and actiPLANS excludes PTO balance tracking. All four offer paid upgrades under $2 per user per month for teams that outgrow the free version.

Ready to try an employee holiday tracker?

The right choice comes down to three questions: how large is your team, do you need UK compliance features like Bradford Factor scoring and audit trails, and does the tool connect to your payroll workflow?

For teams looking to move beyond spreadsheets without a big upfront commitment, actiPLANS offers automated accruals, overlap prevention, and a visual team timeline starting at $1.50 per user per month. Start a free 30-day trial with full access to all features. No credit card required.

Looking for more options? See our guides to free leave management software and free absence management systems.