THE LEAVE POLICY
February will be a month of travel for our family, so I thought now would be a great time to talk about all things travel as a military family. Traveling with a service member can be tricky, and we often need contingencies to our contingencies. Let’s talk about the leave policy for today, though.
First and foremost, leave is the military term for what the civilian world would call PTO. A service member can use leave to do most kinds of travel (although there are some limitations we’ll discuss later), but it has to be approved. Traveling outside the local area, which each squadron defines differently, without approved leave is going AWOL, which brings severe consequences. Compared to this civilian world, the military has a very generous PTO plan, but it comes with significantly more restrictions.
Service members, including reserve and national guard on active duty, accrue leave at a rate of 2.5 days per month. This adds up to 30 days per year, which is much more than you would find at a traditional job. The leave days also carry over to the following year. The most you can carry over from one fiscal year (October instead of January as the new year) to the next is 60 days, meaning you could have a total of 90 days at the end of a year. Any days above the 60 mark are considered “use or lose” because those days disappear if you do not use them before the new year.
My husband has never been fortunate enough to have “use or lose,” and at this rate, I doubt we ever will, but if you do find yourself in that situation, I would encourage you to find every way to use it. We will use as much as possible if we ever catch that white whale.
Leave is used for any workday that our spouses don’t go in and any day that they are outside of the local area. This is one of the biggest reasons we are always low on leave. Going home to visit family while we were stationed at Tinker meant flying, so even if my husband didn’t have to report in for the days we were gone, we still needed leave to be outside of the radius. So a trip home for the holidays, say Saturday to Tuesday, when the squadron is on mid-manning, would cost us 4 days of leave even if we didn’t miss any mandatory reporting days.
The local area is defined by the commander of any given squadron or can be a base-wide rule. At Tinker, we had a local area of 8 hours at one point, which still wasn’t helpful since family was 18 hours away, but at our current base the range is only 6 hours. That will vary from commander to commander and depend on how well the squadron follows the rules. One too many drunk and disorderly charges from military members in a squadron and that local area radius may get very tight. The local area might also change when approaching or immediately after a deployment or when tensions grow worldwide. It is definitely something that your service member should stay on top of because just because you could go on a road trip last weekend doesn’t mean the rules are the same for this one.
Every squadron handles submitting leave a little differently. Usually, paperwork needs to be signed, but that process probably varies from branch to branch and even within the branches. Each squadron will also have different policies on when leave needs to be submitted and when it will be approved. Typical rules of thumb are that continental leave should be submitted up to a month before, and international leave should be submitted between six to eight weeks. Sometimes, we get verbal approval long before the paperwork is actually approved. We had some commanders sign off right away, and others that waited until the very last minute to sign. There is logic to both thought processes. If something happens, the one who signed can cancel leave, and the one who never signed has no need to cancel. Either way, it is stressful not to know for sure that a trip can happen until we board the flight.
Those are the basics of standard leave in the military. There are special leave policies, which we will talk about on Friday. And then we’ll talk about how to plan a trip when we aren’t sure if our spouse can actually go. A lot of frustration comes from struggling to accumulate days off, as well as dealing with canceled or changed plans. However, the military does have one of the most generous PTO policies, and I am working on practicing gratitude for the gifts they give us, so when we get that time with our partners, we should thoroughly enjoy it.