PTO Payout Calculator: What's Your Unused Vacation Worth?

The calculation

Convert your salary to an hourly rate the standard way (salary ÷ 2,080 for the typical 40-hour, 52-week baseline), then multiply by your unused PTO hours. If PTO is tracked in days rather than hours, convert first: 10 unused days on an 8-hour schedule is 80 hours; on a 7.5-hour schedule it's 75 hours.

$80,000 ÷ 2,080 = $38.46/hour. 120 unused hours × $38.46 = $4,615 before taxes — a concrete number worth knowing before negotiating a departure date or deciding whether to use remaining time off before it's lost.

Whether you're even entitled to a payout

Federal law doesn't require paid vacation at all, and doesn't require payout on unused time when you leave — this is governed entirely by state law and your employer's own policy. A handful of states (including California, Colorado, Montana, and Nebraska) treat earned vacation as wages that legally must be paid out, no matter what a handbook says.

In most other states, the employer's written policy controls: if the handbook promises a payout, it has to honor that; if the handbook explicitly states unused time is forfeited ('use it or lose it'), that typically holds up. Checking your specific state's law and your own employee handbook — not assuming either way — is the only way to know for certain before you're counting on that money.

A practical use beyond leaving a job

This same math is useful for anyone deciding whether to use remaining PTO before a use-it-or-lose-it deadline versus letting it accrue toward a payout (where policy allows carryover or cash-out) — putting a real dollar figure on unused time turns an abstract 'I should probably take some days off' into an actual number worth planning around.