How this site is made

Country pages

1. Start from the statute. Each of the 52 country pages names the law that creates the entitlement — the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, the Code du travail, the Fair Work Act — and links the official source on the page.
2. Convert to one unit. Countries count leave in working days, calendar days, six-day Werktage or virkedager, or weeks. We convert every figure to working days on a five-day week so 24 Werktage (20), 30 calendar days (22), 25 virkedager (21) and 5.6 weeks (28) sit in one honest table. The conversion is stated on each page.
3. Record the same four facts everywhere: statutory minimum, payout on termination, whether unused leave expires, and whether cash-out while employed is allowed. Country-specific rules — holiday pay mechanisms, age or service uplifts, carryover deadlines — go in a clearly marked "worth knowing" note.
4. Minimums, not norms. Contracts and collective agreements frequently exceed the statute. We say so, and we report the legal floor, because the floor is what a reader can rely on.

US state pages

1. Start from the enforcing agency. Each page links the state labor agency and, where the rule rests on a statute, regulation or court decision, names it — Colorado's Nieto v. Clark's Market, North Carolina's § 95-25.12, Kansas's K.A.R. 49-20-1.
2. Three payout classes, not two. Most guides split states into "required" and "not required". We found a third class that matters in practice:
   • Required (12) — accrued PTO is earned wages; paid at separation, full stop.
   • Paid by default (5) — paid at separation unless a written forfeiture policy reached the employee. Silence costs the employer.
   • Policy dependent (34) — no statute; the written policy decides, and a promised payout is enforceable.
3. Forfeiture is recorded separately. Four states prohibit "use it or lose it" outright; everywhere else it depends on a written, communicated policy. Caps on future accrual are permitted almost everywhere, including where forfeiture is not.
4. Verified before indexed. Every state page is built from a dataset with a per-state verification flag. A page that has not been checked against agency guidance renders with noindex and is left out of the sitemap. As of the date above, 51 of 51 jurisdictions are verified and published; the gate stays in the code so that any future page starts as a draft.

What the labels mean

"Policy dependent" means the state has no statute that independently forces payout. It does not mean an employer can ignore its own handbook: a written promise to pay out accrued PTO is enforceable as a wage obligation in every state. The label describes the source of the obligation, not whether one exists.

"Reviewed" is the date a person last checked the page against its source. Pages are re-checked twice a year and whenever a reader reports a change. A page with no date is a page you cannot rely on, so every page carries one.

Software pages

What the comparison rests on today: each vendor's published documentation, product screens, pricing pages and programme terms, checked on the date shown on the page. We do not claim hands-on results we have not produced, and every review separates what was observed on screen from what the vendor states.

What is in progress: configuring every tool with one identical policy so the comparison becomes like for like. When a tool has been through this, its review says so and shows the results. The protocol, published on the Leavo review:

• 15 employees; 20 days annual accrual, monthly; a five-day carryover cap at calendar year end
• A two-step approval chain (manager, then HR)
• One employee given a mid-year pay-rate change; one placed on unpaid leave for a month
• Measured: time from sign-up to a working policy
• Checked: carryover cap timing; accrual pause during unpaid leave; audit-log behaviour after a policy edit; balance export contents; per-group public-holiday calendars; enforcement of hard limits at save

Competitor facts live in a dataset with a checked date and come from the competitor's own pricing page, linked on every comparison. Competitors are never sent affiliate traffic.

Commercial relationships

Some links are affiliate links and we disclose them on every page that carries one, above the link rather than below it. Placement and verdicts are set before commercial terms are considered, and we include tools that pay us nothing — plus, on the software pages, the case for buying nothing at all. Full detail here.

Open data

The underlying datasets are published as CSV under CC BY 4.0 on the data page, regenerated from the same source files as the pages on every build, so the tables and the downloads cannot drift apart.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and stamp a new review date on the page. Employment law changes, collective agreements override statutory minimums, and local ordinances can override state defaults; we would rather be corrected than confident.

This is not legal advice

We summarise public law and guidance in plain English so you know what question to ask. For a real payroll decision, confirm with the agency or statute linked on the page, or an employment lawyer in that jurisdiction.