Free staff holiday spreadsheet for Maltese teams

Most free leave-tracker spreadsheets are either too simple to handle growing teams or too complicated to use. This one has reliable formulae that don't break and handles all the things your broken tracker probably falls down on currently.

What is in the spreadsheet

There are seven tabs, in this order:

The formulae are all set up for you so that if you change a date on the Setup sheet, the entitlements, used days and the calendar all update. Add a row to the Leave Log, and the Dashboard changes. There are no complicated bits that normal spreadsheet users wouldn't follow like macros, scripts, add-ons (we're not sure what they are either!?).

Setting it up in 5 steps

Allow yourself 10 minutes for a small team. Five for the steps below, five for adding your people.

Opening it in Google Sheets

Same file and it'll take two minutes.

1. Save the .xlsx file to your computer.
2. Go to drive.google.com and upload it (or drag-and-drop into a folder).
3. Right-click the uploaded file → Open with → Google Sheets.
4. Google Sheets will convert it. All the formulas, dropdowns and conditional formatting carry across.

Once converted, the file lives in Drive and you can share it with the team like any other Sheet. The colour-coding stays. The dropdowns stay. The bank-holiday formula stays.

Handling the tricky bits

The four weeks and four days rule

Maltese statutory vacation leave starts from the equivalent in hours of four weeks and four working days, which is 192 hours, or 24 days for a full-timer on a 40-hour week. Then any public holiday that lands on a weekend adds a day on top. In 2026 three do, so the full entitlement is 216 hours, or 27 days. DIER publishes the figure each year.

The law counts it in hours but nobody runs day-to-day leave in hours, so this spreadsheet works in days. Public holidays that land on working days are separate paid days in their own right and never come out of the allowance.

Part-time staff

Pro-rata by their share of a full working week, weekend-holiday days included.

Mid-year joiners

The spreadsheet pro-rates automatically. The formula works out their full-year allowance, multiplied by the fraction of the leave year they will have been employed. Leave accrues from the first day of employment in Malta, probation included.

Mid-year leavers

Same formula in reverse. The pro-rata factor uses the time they will have been employed during the leave year, not the full year.

Carry-over

Carry-over in Malta has a legal shape. Up to 50% of the year's entitlement can be carried into the next calendar year, but only by agreement, and whatever is carried has to be used first in the new year (it can't be carried twice). The spreadsheet has a Carry-over from last year column that simply adds to this year's entitlement but only for people who were employed at the start of the leave year.

Public holidays

The Public Holidays sheet is pre-loaded with every Maltese national and public holiday for 2026 and 2027, taken from gov.mt. All 14 feed straight into the day-count formulas.

For 2026 specifically:

• 14 paid holidays in total, from New Year's Day to Christmas Day
• 3 fall on weekends (Sette Giugno on Sunday 7 June, Santa Marija on Saturday 15 August and Republic Day on Sunday 13 December). Each one adds a day to everyone's vacation leave instead
• The other 11 land on working days and never come out of anyone's allowance

When you log a leave entry that spans a public holiday, the holiday is automatically excluded from the day count. Book the week of L-Imnarja (Monday 29 June) and the spreadsheet returns 4 not 5.

Considerations for new employers and small teams

If this is the first time you have had to track leave properly, a spreadsheet is more than fine to start. Here are the things that will save you from rebuilding it in six months.

Choose your leave year on purpose, not by accident

In Malta this one mostly picks itself: the calendar year, 1 January to 31 December. It's how DIER publishes each year's entitlement and how the 50% carry-over rule is framed, so fighting it just creates admin. The other option, anniversary-based, where each person's leave year starts on the date they joined is technically fine but quickly makes things complicated. Avoid unless you are a very small team and don't mind the admin hassle!

Write the policy down

One side of A4 is enough at first. It needs to cover the basics: how much leave, how weekend public holidays are handled, the notice period for requests, what happens to unused days at year-end (remember the 50% carry-over cap), what the rules are on sick days during leave, who approves leave, and whether you use shutdown days (you can allocate up to 12 working days of the year's leave for shutdowns and bridge holidays unless a collective agreement says otherwise). DIER has good guidance if you do not want to start from scratch.

Make one person the owner

A spreadsheet with multiple owners becomes a nightmare for conflicting copies. Pick one person who is responsible for entering approved leave, chasing pending requests, and rolling the file over at year end. If there's more than one then use an online holiday tracker like Book Time Off.

Communicate it the same way every time

Decide the channel for leave requests · email, a Slack message in #time-off, a form · and stick to it. Random verbal requests at the coffee machine are how things get missed. Again an online leave tracker like Book Time Off handles requests and approvals in one place.

Take stock quarterly

Once a quarter, glance at the Dashboard. Look for two things:

• People with too much leave left. If somebody is in October with 18 days remaining, they are not going to use it. Have a conversation early rather than awkwardly denying a month long request for the whole of December!
• People in the red. The Dashboard turns the Remaining cell red if it goes negative. Catch it in time and there is no awkward conversation about owed days.

Plan for cover, not just absence

The Year Calendar is for spotting clashes early. If three people in the same team all want the last week of August, you want to know in March, not on 20 August.

What this tracker does well

What this tracker cannot do

Honest section. Every spreadsheet leave tracker · including ours · runs into the same wall eventually. Knowing where the wall is up front saves you a lot of pain.

When you will know it is time to move on

We won't turn this into a sales pitch but there are obvious limitations of spreadsheet tracking. In our experience once you get to four or more people in your team these things start to happen:

• You have "I thought I had booked that off" misunderstandings.
• The owner of the file is on holiday and nobody else can find it.
• Two people both update the file in the same afternoon and one of their changes vanishes.
• You crossed 15-20 employees and the rows are getting hard to scan.
• You have multiple managers approving leave and there is no way to keep them in sync.
• Year-end rollover took half a day and you found three errors afterwards.
• You want staff to be able to see their own balance without asking.
• You have started thinking about TOIL, hours-based contracts, or shift patterns.

For the full story of what breaking point actually looks like (with screenshots of the alternative), read how to track annual leave without a spreadsheet.

Sources