Leave (U.S. military)

In the United States Military, leave is permission to be away from one's unit for a specific period of time.

Entitlement

Under normal circumstance, all personnel are granted 30 days of leave per year. This time is usually used for vacations and other extended time periods away from the service that are longer than three days or need to be taken in the middle of the week. Leave is accumulated at the rate of 2.5 days per month. A member's leave is annotated in the monthly Leave and Earnings Statement.

Under 5 U.S.C. §6323(a)(1), federal employees who are reservists are allowed “15 days” of annual paid leave for reserve or National Guard training. Prior to 2000, the Justice Department, as had other federal agencies, included days employees were not scheduled to work but would be at reserve training when calculating how much leave an employee used. This miscalculation resulted in the Federal Appeal of Butterbaugh v. Department of Justice, 336 F.3d 1332 (Fed. Cir. 2003). The Butterbaugh Decision changed things for these reservists and would result in many more federal employees finding their reservist time wrongly charged.

Leave and Passes

Leave and passes are terms to describe days off work. A typical weekend day off is also known as a regular pass. Up to four consecutive days off can be either leave days or pass days. Leave days are deducted from the servicemember's 30 annual days off. Pass days are not deducted. Five or more days off must be deducted as leave. Leave and pass days cannot be taken consecutively, i.e., four days of pass followed or preceded by leave days must have a workday in between.

If leave is taken through a weekend, Saturday and Sunday are also deducted as leave days. For example, a servicemember who takes leave from Thursday to the following Tuesday will be deducted six days of leave for Thursday, Friday, "Saturday, Sunday," Monday, and Tuesday.

Passes can also be awarded to servicemembers for particular achievements. Although passes may be taken for up to 4 days, 3 day passes are granted on most occasions. When 3 day passes are awarded, they are most commonly taken over a weekend giving the servicemember one duty day off.

AWOL

Away without leave. See main article. AWOL

Different Types of Leave

The four most common types of leave are: Ordinary leave which is regular chargeable leave time, emergency leave which is processed more quickly due to an emergency situation but still treated as chargeable leave, convalescent leave which is non-chargeable and only allowed with a doctor's signature that states the servicemember cannot return to duty for an extended period of time, permissive TDY, which is non-chargeable and is only used while traveling between stations while using their leave for government related purposes. Servicemembers using PTDY are not charged while on leave but are also not granted travel pay.

Leave Carries Over Year to Year

Leave time will "roll over" from year to year. A servicemember may carry up to 60 days of leave before he or she must take it. Leave in excess of 60 days is known as "Use or Lose", if the servicemember does not use the excess leave by October 1st he or she will lose it. Under certain circumstances, the use or lose threshold may be extended to 80 days, if the member is unable to take leave due to duty requirements, usually because of a deployment. If a servicemember leaves the military without having used all his or her leave time, the unusued days are paid for at the member's regular rate of pay upon separation. Conversely, though the situation is less common, pay will be deducted as "excess leave" on separation if too many days were taken.

Block leave

Block leave refers to time when most or all of the unit takes leave at the same time (as a "block"). Commonly, block leave time is allowed during the summer and Christmas holidays, and before and after deployments.

Terminal Leave

Prior to separation or retirement from the military, a member may take the remainder of the leave they have. For instance, if a member's separation or retirement date is May 30, and the member has 30 days of leave accrued, the member may go on "terminal leave" beginning May 1. All their outprocessing from the service would need to be accomplished prior to May 1. Once they entered "terminal leave" they would essentially be out of the military, but would still collect a paycheck and other entitlements, such as basic allowance for housing, basic allowance for subsistence and medical coverage until their official separation or retirement date on May 30.