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How Can I Set Leave Quotas in Hours Instead of Days?

Last updated on January 20, 2026

How Can I Set Leave Quotas in Hours Instead of Days?

If your team's leave policies are written in hours rather than days — common for shift work, part-time roles, and companies with mixed working schedules — you can switch the whole workspace's tracking unit with a single dropdown. The change rolls through Leave Policies, reports, and User profiles in one go.

Your team has full-time staff working 8-hour days and part-time staff working 4-hour shifts. Tracking everyone in days makes a "1 day off" mean different things depending on who's taking it. Switching to hours fixes that — a 4-hour shift booked off becomes 4 hours, full stop, regardless of who works what schedule.
Plan requirement
The Hours quota mode is on the Complete plan only. Core-plan accounts can request leave in days and (with the Half-day setting) half-days, but the workspace-level Days / Hours toggle is gated to Complete. The in-app tooltip on the setting confirms this directly: "When activated, this option tracks the duration of all leaves and quotas in hours. Available only for the Complete plan."

Where the Setting Lives

  1. Sign in at app.vacationtracker.io with an Admin account.
  2. In the left-hand menu, expand Workspace Settings and click General.
  3. Scroll to the Configuration section. The dropdown labeled Set Leave Quotas in sits below the Enable user end date toggle.
  4. Open the dropdown and pick Hours (the alternative is Days, the default).
  5. Click Save at the bottom of the page.
Workspace Settings → General → Configuration section showing the

What Changes When You Switch to Hours

Flipping the unit re-renders quota information across three places:

  • Leave Policies — under Leave Setup → Locations → Edit Leave Policies, every Yearly Leave Quota field now reads in hours. A "10 day" annual quota becomes the equivalent number of hours based on the Location's working-day length (typically 80 hours for a Mon–Fri 8-hour-day Location).
  • Reports — Leave Request Report, Leave Balance Report, and Monthly Leave Balance Report all show their numeric columns in hours instead of days.
  • User profiles — Users see their balance in both days and hours on the profile page, with the hourly breakdown available in the info bubble next to the quota number. So even after switching, the at-a-glance "I have 3 days left" reading is preserved alongside the precise hourly figure.

Leave requests submitted by Users will collect duration in the same hours-based unit going forward, which pairs naturally with the Shortest Leave Duration options for hourly granularity (1 hour, 30 minutes, or 15 minutes — also Complete-plan).

How Working-Day Length Plays Into It

Hours-based tracking lives on top of each Location's working-day configuration. A Location set to "8-hour workday" treats one calendar day off as 8 hours of leave; a Location set to "6.5-hour workday" treats it as 6.5 hours. Vacation Tracker keeps that math consistent — when you switch to Hours, every existing day-based balance is re-interpreted using the Location's working-day length so nobody gains or loses leave from the unit change. The day-equivalent display on profiles uses the same conversion.

Custom workdays
If individual Users on the same Location have different working-day lengths (set via custom workweek on their profile), the conversion uses each User's own working-day length when computing their day-equivalent display. So "8 hours" can read as "1 day" for a full-timer and "2 days" for someone on a 4-hour custom workweek, and both are correct.

Common Questions

No. The switch is a unit conversion, not a recalculation. A User who had 10 days remaining on an 8-hour-workday Location will simply see "80 hours" after the toggle — same time off, different label. Reverting to Days converts back the same way.

No — Set Leave Quotas in is a workspace-wide preference, not a per-Location one. Every Location in the workspace runs in the same unit. If you have a mix of teams on hourly and daily policies, switch to Hours globally and let each Location's working-day length handle the conversion to a sensible day-equivalent on User profiles.

Yes — Vacation Tracker shows both representations on the User profile. The headline reads in days (e.g. "3 days remaining") with the hourly breakdown a click away in the info bubble next to the quota. So the day-based intuition stays even though the underlying tracking unit is hours.

What's Next?

How Do I Set Half-Day Intervals? How Can I Create and Configure Leave Types? How Do I Create and Configure Leave Policies?
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