Terminal Leave Calculator

Leave you sell back is paid on your basic pay alone. Leave you take is ordinary active duty, so it pays basic pay plus BAH and BAS and keeps TRICARE running. That gap is the entire decision, it is statutory rather than folklore, and it is why taking leave is almost always worth more per day than selling it.

Sell back or take it

The statute is unusually blunt about the basis for a sell-back payment. 37 U.S.C. § 501(b)(1):

“A member ... who has accrued leave to the member’s credit at the time of the member’s discharge, is entitled to be paid in cash or by a check on the Treasurer of the United States for such leave on the basis of the basic pay to which the member was entitled on the date of discharge.”

37 U.S.C. § 501(b)(1)

“On the basis of the basic pay” is the operative phrase. Nothing in that provision reaches allowances, so a sell-back cheque contains no BAH and no BAS. Leave that you take instead is simply active duty: you are still serving, so every element of your pay continues, and so do TRICARE coverage and commissary and exchange access.

For most members BAH is the largest single component after basic pay, which means the per-day difference is substantial rather than marginal. The calculator above will not estimate it for you, because BAH depends on your duty ZIP code, grade and dependent status — put your own figure in and the comparison appears.

Two situations genuinely favour selling: you cannot fit the days in before your separation date, or you have already used your career limit.

The 60-day career limit

The sell-back limit is a career limit, not a per-separation one, and the statute anchors it to a date in 1976:

“However, the number of days of leave for which payment is made may not exceed sixty, less the number of days for which payment was previously made under this section after February 9, 1976.”

37 U.S.C. § 501(b)(3)

So if you sold 30 days at an earlier separation, you have 30 left — for good. Days above the remaining allowance can only be taken as leave; they cannot be converted to cash.

There is an exception worth knowing. Under § 501(b)(5) and § 501(f) the limit does not apply to leave accrued by reserve-component members, Retired Reserve members or retired regular members while serving on active duty in support of a contingency operation, nor to certain reserve active-duty periods longer than 30 days. If your balance was built during a contingency mobilisation, ask your finance office before assuming the cap binds.

How leave accrues, and the other 60-day cap

10 U.S.C. § 701(a): “A member of an armed force is entitled to leave at the rate of 2½ calendar days for each month of active service” That is 30 days a year, and it excludes time absent without leave, absent over leave, or confined under a court-martial sentence.

A second 60-day figure appears in the same section, and it is a different rule that is constantly conflated with the sell-back limit. § 701(b):

“Except as provided in subsections (e) and (f), a member may not accumulate more than 60 days’ leave. However, leave taken during a fiscal year may be charged to leave accumulated during that fiscal year without regard to this limitation.”

10 U.S.C. § 701(b)

One caps what you may carry from year to year; the other caps what you may ever be paid for. Hitting the accumulation cap costs you leave through use-or-lose; hitting the sell-back cap only means the days must be taken rather than sold.

Starting a federal job on terminal leave

This is the question a separating member with a USAJOBS offer actually needs answered, and it has a clean statutory answer that most discussion of the topic misses. 5 U.S.C. § 5534a:

“A member of a uniformed service who has performed active service and who is on terminal leave pending separation from, or release from active duty in, that service under honorable conditions may accept a civilian office or position in the Government of the United States, its territories or possessions, or the government of the District of Columbia, and he is entitled to receive the pay of that office or position in addition to pay and allowances from the uniformed service for the unexpired portion of the terminal leave.”

5 U.S.C. § 5534a

So you may start the civilian job while still on terminal leave and draw both the civilian salary and your military pay and allowances for the unexpired portion of the leave. The section is written for “a member of a uniformed service” generally, and it turns on two conditions: you are on terminal leave pending separation or release, and that separation is under honorable conditions.

In practice this makes the overlap between your terminal leave and your entry-on-duty date financially valuable rather than a problem to be avoided.

The extra rule for officers

Officers face one additional restriction that enlisted members do not, and it is narrower than it is usually described. 10 U.S.C. § 973(b)(2)(A) provides that a covered officer may not hold or exercise the functions of a civil office in the U.S. Government that

• is an elective office;
• requires Presidential appointment with Senate advice and consent; or
• is a position in the Executive Schedule under 5 U.S.C. §§ 5312–5317.

Those three categories are what the restriction reaches. An ordinary General Schedule position is none of them. § 973(b)(1) also limits who is covered: regular officers on the active-duty list, and retired regular, reserve or Space Force officers serving on active duty under a call or order longer than 270 days.

A 2016 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinion examined the officer case in detail, which is a good indication that the interaction is worth checking with a judge advocate if your prospective position is political, Senate-confirmed or in the Executive Schedule. For a GS role, § 5534a is the provision that governs.

PTDY, and what TDY stands for

TDY stands for temporary duty — a short-term assignment away from your permanent duty station. Permissive TDY, written PTDY, is a discretionary form of it granted around separation for house-hunting and job searching.

The distinction that matters:

• PTDY is not chargeable leave. It does not debit your leave balance, so it can run alongside terminal leave rather than competing with it.
• It authorises the absence, not the trip. PTDY does not by itself fund travel or per diem.
• It is discretionary. A commander approves it; it is not an entitlement in the way accrued leave is.

We are deliberately not quoting a number of days. The allowance is set by the Joint Travel Regulations and by each service’s own separation regulation, and it varies with circumstance — whether you are retiring rather than separating, and whether the search is overseas. The authoritative documents are not publicly retrievable in a form we can cite with confidence, and a stale figure here would be worse than none. Confirm the current allowance with your transition office.

Why this asks for your LES figure

Most calculators of this kind embed a military pay table and quietly rot. This one asks for your monthly basic pay instead, for a specific reason.

The 2026 rates of monthly basic pay are set out in Schedule 8 of Executive Order 14368 — but Part I of that schedule is published in the Federal Register as an embedded image, not as machine-readable text, and dfas.mil, militarypay.defense.gov and travel.dod.mil all refuse automated retrieval. Rather than transcribe a table by hand and risk an error in a figure you might plan around, this tool takes the number from your own Leave and Earnings Statement, which is authoritative for you and cannot go out of date.

One assumption is on display: daily pay is monthly pay divided by 30, the standard military convention. § 501(b)(1) fixes the basis as basic pay on the date of discharge without stating the daily conversion, so treat the output as a well-founded estimate. DFAS computes the official amount on your final pay statement.