How to set up your company’s Leave durations policy

The Leave durations policy controls the types of leave durations employees can request for each day in Leave Dates.

It allows you to decide whether employees can request:

All-day leave;
Half-day leave; and/or
Custom-duration leave measured by specific time intervals, such as 15-minute or 1-hour increments

This policy is particularly useful when your organisation wants to control the minimum duration of leave employees can book. For example, you can prevent employees from booking short periods of leave, such as two hours, and require them to book at least a half-day or a full day instead.

Feature availability: With our Plus plan, you have full policy editing rights, enabling you to create your own personalised leave duration policy with different rules for each leave type; on the Essential plan, you are able to edit the default policy, which will then be applied to all leave types; on the Starter plan, you cannot edit any of the policy settings (these are configured to the Leave Dates system default) but you can still view all the policies to understand what rules are being applied.

Open the Leave durations policy

To access the policy:

Go to Settings.
Select Policies.
Select Leave durations.

The policy opens on the Details tab.

Understand the system default leave durations

The leave duration policy has four options:

Option	What it controls	System default
All day	Whether a full working day can be requested	Allowed
Half day	Whether half-day leave can be requested	Allowed
Custom	Whether a specific part of a working day can be requested	Allowed
Custom interval	The time interval used when selecting a custom duration (which is therefore the minimum leave duration allowed)	15 minutes

These defaults apply to all Leave Dates users in your company. Therefore, under these default settings, a user could request:

A complete day off;
The morning off;
The afternoon off;
Part of a day off such as 2 hours 15 minutes.

The exact options available to an employee depend not only on the company's Leave durations policy, but also the specific employee's circumstances. For example, some options may not appear in the leave request form when an employee works part-time, already has leave booked, or is requesting leave over a non-working day.

Change the default leave durations

From the Details tab, you can change the default settings for the permitted leave durations and automatically apply these to all leave types.

All day leave - allows an employee to request leave for their entire working day without needing to enter start or end times.
- To turn this option off, untick the default All day box.
Half day leave - allows an employee to select either morning or afternoon when adjusting the duration of an individual day in their leave request.
- To turn this option off, untick the default Half day box.
Custom leave - permits an employee to book off a specific amount of time as leave, rather than a full or half day. It enables start and end times to be entered in the leave request, with the exact leave intervals determined by the custom interval set. The custom interval is also the minimum leave duration allowed, so a 30 minute interval permits a leave request of 0.5 hours, 1 hour, 1.5 hours, or 2 hours and so on.
- To turn the custom leave option off, untick the default Custom leave box (the custom interval box is then automatically greyed out as it no longer applies).
- To leave this option on but change the custom interval, keep the Custom leave box ticked and use the drop-down to select your preferred new custom interval (the options range from 5 minutes to 2 hours).
- Please note that while your selection for the custom interval will apply to all users, the daily start and end times for each employee will be dictated by their specific work schedule. So if you set the custom interval as 1 hour, an employee who works 10am to 3pm each day, will be able to book leave from 10am to 3pm in hourly blocks of any length (e.g. 10-11am, 11am-2pm, or 1-3pm etc).

The policy screen contains an important notice: Intervals apply to everybody, including admins. This means the configured duration interval is not simply an employee-level preference; instead the policy applies to everyone, including your Leave Dates’ administrators. Therefore, when making changes, consider how the policy needs to work for everyone who may make leave requests.

Apply different duration rules to different leave types

The Leave durations policy does not have to apply exactly the same way to every leave type.

The Details tab contains a list of leave types and allows each one to either Use default or have its own configuration.

All leave types are automatically set to use the company default initially. So if a particular leave type should have different leave duration settings:

Find the leave type.
Turn off Use default by unticking the box.
Select or clear All day, Half day, or Custom as appropriate.
If Custom is enabled, select the required Custom interval.
Select Save changes.

This lets you set different duration rules for each leave type. For example, you can allow employees to book annual leave in one-hour intervals while requiring a minimum of a half-day for sick leave, without changing the rules for other leave types.

Leave Dates automatically switches a leave type back to Use default when its configuration matches the company default. This can happen when you manually change the settings for a leave type, but the settings you’ve chosen actually match the default. Or if you change the default settings and they now match changes you previously made to individual leave types. This prevents unnecessary duplicate configurations and keeps genuine exceptions clear.

Review changes in the Updates tab

The Updates tab provides a full audit trail of changes made to the Leave durations policy. Every change is recorded as an event in the timeline, with no exceptions. Events are never deleted or modified, so you can always see the history of how the policy has changed.

The most recent changes appear at the top. For each event, you can see when the change was made, who made it, and what policy settings were changed. By comparing the Before and After columns, you can see exactly how the rules were updated.

If the user who made a change is later deleted from Leave Dates, their name may appear as “(Deleted)”, but the event itself remains in the audit trail.

This history is useful when you need to understand when a duration rule was changed and what the previous and new settings were.

Test your Leave durations policy

Before saving your Leave durations policy, use the Test tab to check that your rules work as intended. This allows you to identify and correct any issues before the changes affect employees.

The test tool lets you check whether particular leave durations are allowed under your current policy settings. It is much faster than manually creating and cancelling leave requests through the Wallchart.

For example, if you have disabled half-day leave for a particular leave type, you can use the Test tab to confirm that a half-day request is no longer permitted.

To test your policy:

Open Settings > Policies > Leave durations.
Select the Test tab.
Select the relevant leave type and duration you want to test.
Review the results to check whether the duration is allowed under your current settings.
If the results are not as expected, return to the policy settings, make the necessary changes, and test again before saving.

Testing your policy before saving helps you confirm that your rules work as intended without having to create and cancel requests manually through the Wallchart.

Reset the Leave durations policy

If you want to return the configuration to the system defaults, select Reset to system default at the bottom of the policy.

The default configuration is:

All day: enabled
Half day: enabled
Custom: enabled
Custom interval: 15 minutes

After resetting, review the Details tab for all leave types before continuing.