What is Sick bank leave??? Can you explain the concept??

10 comments

1. Sick day- Paid days off for employees who are sick or taking care of someone who is sick.

   Bank leave- The aggregate number of days the employee has.

2. I think you have 2 terms mixed together. Many employers offer paid “sick leave” and you may be eligible for a certain amount of days or hours annually. Some employers will allow you to “bank” them, or keep them if not used in a calendar year for future use.

   Say you’re eligible for 5 sick days per year, but you only used 2 in your first year of employment. 3 days are now “banked” (like you’d keep money in a bank account) so you have 8 days to use in your second year. Some employers will allow you to plan ahead to take time off and use a sick day to recoup the pay for missing work that day.

3. I get 4 hr of sick leave per paycheck, and that 4 hr goes into my sick leave time off. It banks for an unlimited amount, allowing me to potentially have thousands of hours of time off in case of getting seriously sick.

4. I’ll explain sick leave from an Australian perspective, but I’m sure it is very similar to the American system.

   If you are employed here on a full time or part time basis, every full week you work, you accrue a set amount of hours towards both annual leave (vacation leave) and sick leave. The amount of hours you accrue is dependant on the amount of hours you work per week (pro rata).

   This accrues every week.

   You accrue a minimum of 10 sick leave days a year every 12 months as a full time worker. Part time workers accrue less, depending on the amount of hours they work. Annual leave accrues at the rate of 20 days per year (again less for part timers) These are the minimum.

   If you don’t use all of these days in any given 12 month period, they carry over into the next year. So if you don’t take a sick day or vacation day for 5 years, you will have accrued 50 sick days and 100 vacation days if you worked full time in the preceding 5 years.

   If you become ill on a working day and cannot work, you can use your accrued sick leave hours for that day to ensure that you still receive a day’s pay even though you were too I’ll to attend work.

5. How much sick leave a person gets depends on their employer. My employer gives us 8 hours a month and it never expires. I have somewhere around 4 or 5 months of paid sick leave at this point. If I ever became seriously ill for an extended amount of time and burned through all of that, there are other options for full or partial pay. Other employees could donate their sick leave to me, or I could apply for various state programs.

6. EX: I was a public school teacher. We were give 2 sick days a year. If you did not use them you could bank them – meaning year 2 you would have the 2 allotted sick days plus 2 more in the bank if needed.

   You could retire in 25 years. If you never took a sick day that is 50 days in the bank meaning you could retire 50 days early.

   You could retire with full benefits in 25 years. But if you banked or did not use any sick days, you would have 50 days in the bank. Therefore you could retire 50 days early – using all your sick days at the end of your career.

   Different jobs or companies give different numbers of sick days per year. The first 10 years my husband was at his company he was given 10 sick days a year plus 4 weeks vacation. After 10 years he still has 10 sick days but unlimited vacation time – meaning the 10 sick days are irrelevant.

7. My last job had several different banks of PTO that had very specific uses. We had vacation where I got 10 days per year paid out in two lumps. 5 days in January and 5 days in July (15 days after 5 years), and I could use those whenever. I had short term leave, which accrued each paycheck, and I could use those in 4 hour minimum time slots. Those were your sick days. I had something like 20 days banked by the time I left after 4 years. And then there was long term leave (sick days), which was both accrued and carried over short term leave. That was used for an extended absence such as a hospital stay or something like that. I had something like 30 days of that built up. I honestly hated that system.

   My current job gives me 3 weeks (15 days) of general PTO, plus an additional day for each year of service, so currently I get 16 days. Plus they offer a PTO buy program where you can take a week’s pay divided by 52 weeks, and have thay deducted from your paycheck, and that will get you an additional week of PTO. So starting out you can get up to a full 4 weeks of PTO per year basically, and you can use it however you want. I much prefer this system over the system of my last company. Mainly because I get 4 weeks of vacation per year basically lol

8. Sick days are days off, typically paid, but not always.

   Some employers allow you to “bank” sick days, vacation days, or occasionally both, which means a certain number of the ones you haven’t used by the end of the year carry over into next year. Effectively giving you more time off than you’d otherwise have in a normal year.

   “Sick bank leave” isn’t a thing. You probably heard someone talking about using banked sick leave.

9. The term “bank”, in this context is used to mean like “piggy bank”. A container to keep all of your units of value.

   I accrue an amount of vacation hours and sick leave hours per pay period. It is part of my total compensation (along with other benefits).

   Currently I have about 180 vacation hours, and 620 sick leave hours. This is hours of paid time off work. I have unlimited sick leave accrual. My vacation maximum is 240 hours before it becomes ‘use it or lose it’. I haven’t needed to use that much sick time.

10. Sure, US doesn’t have a federal mandatory leave policy (but some states do, like NJ). But you do get vacation and sick time from your employer.

    One way is PTO (paid time off). Your job might offer you a total paid of say, 4 weeks a year, and you can use them as fit – vacation, sick leave, just a day off, etc.

    The more common older option is to offer an amount of vacation days and an amount of sick days. Vacation days are yours for whatever. But sick days, there will be a policy of what qualifies (your sick, kids sick, doctors appointment, etc.) Maybe after so many days you have to provide a doctors note. Businesses are moving away from this because it becomes a liability and a hassle to track doctors notes. Also, you run the risk of someone maybe saying, for example “I have anxiety, and I need a day off” and now you could open a bag of disability accommodation worms.

    My job, for example, gives 4 weeks vacation, and 4 weeks sick. You can bank both and carry them over to the next year, but when you retire you can only cash out vacation time. If I claim “sick leave” I’m supposed to have a valid excuse, but it’s not enforced.

    My last job was just less time, 3 weeks vacation, 3 weeks sick. Sick leave was more stringently enforced, but only after 4 days or so.

    Before that, I had unlimited PTO – if your work is caught up, you probably can take off, just don’t be a dick.