Paying daily and hourly workers for paid leave and holidays

For salaried staff, paid leave is easy: their salary doesn’t change. For workers paid by the day or the hour, it’s a real problem. Their pay is built from attendance, and a day of approved annual leave has no clock-in behind it. If your payroll only counts punches, everyone who takes leave is quietly paid less that month.

That’s not a small error. In Ghana, the Labour Act requires annual leave on full pay and payment for public holidays. In Nigeria, the Labour Act also requires annual leave on full pay for the workers it covers. Short-changing leave days isn’t a rounding issue, it’s a breach.

Three ways attendance-based pay usually works

Before fixing leave, it helps to be clear about how you pay these workers in the first place.

1. Hours worked × hourly rate. The payroll adds up the hours from the attendance report and multiplies by the rate. Simple, and common for casual and part-time staff.

2. Pay worked out day by day. Each attendance record is turned into money as it happens, at that day’s rate. A Sunday might pay more, a public holiday more again, and overtime separately. At month end, payroll adds up what’s already been earned.

3. A monthly salary, adjusted for attendance. The employee has a monthly salary, and it’s pro-rated by the days they were expected to work and actually attended. This is common in West Africa for monthly-paid staff whose pay depends on turning up.

How leave should be paid in each

The principle is the same in all three: a day of approved paid leave should pay what the employee would have earned if they had worked that day as scheduled.

• Hours worked: add the hours they were scheduled to work on each leave day to their paid hours.
• Day by day: create a payment for each scheduled session that falls inside the approved leave, at that session’s normal rate.
• Monthly pro-rata: count a leave day as a full attended day, so it doesn’t reduce their share of the salary.

Two details matter:

• Only scheduled days count. If the employee wasn’t rostered to work on a day inside their leave, such as their usual day off, there’s nothing to pay for that day.
• Use the rate for that day. If a leave day falls on a day that normally pays a higher rate, the higher rate applies, just as it would have if they’d worked.

Mistakes that short-change workers

1. Paying leave only at month end, as a lump sum. Errors are hard to spot and harder to explain. Pay it day by day so it shows up as it happens.
2. Using a flat hourly rate for every leave day. That ignores holiday and weekend rates in the schedule.
3. Forgetting leave that starts before a pay period and ends inside it. Each day belongs to the pay period it falls in.
4. No trail. When a worker queries their pay, you should be able to show, day by day, what was paid for leave and why.

How Eban handles it

Eban supports all three pay modes: hours from the attendance summary, attendance that’s turned into money as it happens, and monthly salaries pro-rated by attendance. Approved paid leave is paid per scheduled session, at the rate the work schedule would have paid, including holiday and non-working-day rates. Days the employee wasn’t scheduled to work are skipped, and each payment is recorded against the leave request, so you can answer “why was I paid this?” with the actual numbers. Leave that hasn’t been paid yet is flagged on the payroll run instead of being silently left out.