There are a few leave calculators for South Africa already, and they all answer the question from the employee’s side: how many days do I have left. This one answers it from the employer’s side, which turns out to be a different question, because what an employer needs is a rand figure and a compliance check, not a day count.
It puts the leave balance in rand, not just in days. Accrued annual leave is a real liability sitting in your books, and it is the one thing section 40 says you must pay out when somebody leaves. The tool leads with that number.
It handles the section 40(c) pay-out floor, which I have not seen in another free tool. The pay-out for the current, incomplete cycle is not simply whatever your accrual method produced. Section 40(c) sets a minimum of one day’s remuneration for every 17 days the employee worked, and then allows any basis “at least as favourable to the employee”. So one day per 17 days worked is a floor, not a method you elect. An employee on a five day week, eight months into a cycle, has accrued exactly 10 of their 15 days on the 21 consecutive day method, but has worked about 174 days, which puts the floor at 10.23 days. On R18,000 a month that gap is about R190. Small on one employee, less small across a payroll, and it is the sort of thing that surfaces at the CCMA rather than in a payroll report. The tool shows the balance and the pay-out as two separate numbers for that reason.
It applies the earnings threshold, which most leave tools ignore entirely. From 1 May 2026 an employee earning over R269,600.90 a year is excluded from sections 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17(2) and 18(3), so you are not statutorily obliged to pay them overtime or Sunday premiums. What the threshold does not touch is every single leave entitlement, and the notice period. A tool that ignores the threshold overstates what you owe a manager, and one that applies it too broadly understates their leave.
It has the parental leave position as it actually stands. On 3 October 2025 the Constitutional Court confirmed in Van Wyk that the old maternity and parental leave sections discriminate between classes of parents. The declaration is suspended for 36 months, but paragraph 5 of the order reads replacement wording into the Act in the meantime, so it is the law now rather than a pending proposal. Section 25A, the old ten days for the non-birth parent, is gone. A single parent, or the only employed party, gets four consecutive months. Where both parents are employed they share four months and ten days in the aggregate. Two things I found widely reported wrongly while building this, including by some large firms: the four months and ten days applies where both parents are employed, so a single parent gets four months and not four months and ten days, and although the Court did strike down the under-two age limit on adoption leave, that part of the order is suspended as well and the read-in wording keeps the limit, so the age limit still stands for now. I went to the judgment itself rather than trusting the summaries.
It gets the small traps right. A three hour Sunday shift still costs you a full day, because section 16(2) floors the payment at the ordinary daily wage. Family responsibility leave has two separate gates, so somebody on a three day week never qualifies however long they have been with you. And an unworked public holiday adds nothing to a monthly salary, because the salary already covers that day, which sounds obvious until you see a tool add a day’s pay for it.
Try it here: BCEA Leave Days Calculator South Africa (Employers)
It models one employee against the statutory minimum, so it does not know about your bargaining council agreement or a sectoral determination, and those override the BCEA upward wherever they apply. General information rather than legal advice. I would be interested to hear whether the section 22(4) election, reducing the first sick leave cycle by days taken in the first six months, is something employers actually apply in practice, because the Act clearly makes it optional and I suspect most payroll systems either always do it or never do.