Sri Lanka Annual Leave Calculator — Casual, Medical & Annual Holidays

Sri Lanka's private-sector leave entitlement is set by § 6 of the Shop and Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954. The Act treats annual leave and casual / medical leave as two distinct buckets and computes both on a calendar-year basis (1 January – 31 December). This calculator implements the statutory text directly: there is no rounding fudge, no “13 months = 1.08 years” approximation, and no employer-policy assumption baked in. It returns the statutory floor, and every figure on the page is traceable to the clauses and Department of Labour guidance cited in the Sources section below.

1. Find your year of service.Year 1 is the calendar year in which you joined; year 2 is the next calendar year; and so on. The year you joined — even if you joined on 2 January — is always year 1.
2. Annual leave. Year 1 = 0 days. Year 2 is set by the joining quarter: Q1 → 14, Q2 → 10, Q3 → 7, Q4 → 4 days. Year 3 onwards = the full 14 days.
3. Casual / medical leave. In year 1, accrual is proportionate— one day for each completed period of two months of service, capped at 7. From year 2 onwards: the full 7 days every calendar year.
4. Subtract what you've already used. Remaining = entitlement − leave already taken. The Act does not require employers to carry unused leave forward, so each calendar year stands on its own.

The first-year “quarter rule” (Q1 (Jan – Mar) = 14, Q2 (Apr – Jun) = 10, Q3 (Jul – Sep) = 7, Q4 (Oct – Dec) = 4) is the most commonly misunderstood part of § 6. Many employers either deny annual leave entirely in year one (legally correct) but then continue to deny it in year two (incorrect), or grant the full 14 days from day one (also incorrect). The proration in year two is exactly what the Act provides for.

The calculator's casual-leave figure is computed via floor(completedMonths / 2) and verified independently against the iterative “step forward by two months and count” method that the Department of Labour's guidance pages describe in words. Both methods agree to the day, on every input we have tested. A “completed month” here is judged by day-of-month, not by a 30-day average: a 31 January start does not complete its first month until 1 March, because 28 February falls short of the 31st. That detail matters for end-of-month joiners, who otherwise get credited a phantom extra accrual period.

Two boundary cases are worth spelling out because they trip up most HR spreadsheets. First, the joining year and the second calendar year are different things: someone who started on 2 January and someone who started on 30 December of the same year share the same year-1 status, but the December joiner accrues zero casual days (no completed two-month period) while the January joiner accrues five. Second, the quarter rule keys off the joiningquarter, not the current quarter — a Q4 joiner is locked to 4 annual days for the whole of their second calendar year, even when that year's entitlement is “used” in the following June. The calculator's year-by-year table makes this explicit so you can see which rule each row is under.

Public holidays gazetted as Mercantile Holidays sit on top of these leave entitlements; they are not deducted from your annual / casual balance. If you need to count actual working days between two dates — for a notice period, a project deadline, or a pro-rated salary — use our Sri Lanka working days calculator, which already bakes in the gazetted holiday list. Maternity, paternity, and study leave are governed by separate sections (§ 18A; Establishments Code Chapter XII; etc.) and are out of scope here — see our maternity leave calculator for that.

Leave is a paid entitlement, so what each day is worth depends on your wage. If you want to sanity-check a leave-encashment offer or work out the cost of unpaid leave beyond your statutory days, pair this tool with the Sri Lanka overtime pay calculator for daily-rate maths, and the Sri Lanka income tax calculator to see the after-tax effect of any leave payout on your annual figure. None of those numbers change your statutory leave entitlement — they only help you price it.

• Shop and Office Employees (Regulation of Employment and Remuneration) Act No. 19 of 1954 — full text (LawNet, Ministry of Justice)
• Department of Labour, Sri Lanka — Act publication index
• Department of Labour, Sri Lanka — official site (interpretation guidance on § 6 and the second-year quarter rule)
• Ministry of Public Administration — gazetted Mercantile Holidays list

Figures on this page were last cross-checked against the cited sources on 2026-05-12. The page is reviewed every six months and after any amendment to the Shop and Office Employees Act.