How long should booking and approving leave really take?

Minutes. Seconds, even. Essentially, it shouldn’t take long at all. And the good news is – for most of us, it doesn’t. Pats on the back all round.

OK, so ‘software works as intended’ isn’t the most click-baity of openers, but doing what it says on the tin is still, in our (only slightly biased) opinion, the greatest marketing hook out there. Literally, what more could you want?!

If you ask Google how long annual leave approval should take, you’ll get a load of vague advice to “respond promptly” and “communicate well” – what you won’t get, is a number. 

Annoying, if what you’re after is a benchmark. How else will you know if your two-day turnaround is super speedy or sluggish? Is your rejection rate normal, or is there any truth in the “office Grinch” nickname you seem to have earned?

To find out, we looked at the data. We analysed 744,000 real leave requests to see what is actually happening across workplaces.

The results upend the idea that leave approval is a broken process, a bureaucratic bottleneck choking productivity. Our data tells a different, happier, if slightly less dramatic story: annual leave approval is remarkably fast, outright refusal is vanishingly rare, and automation is quietly transforming how businesses operate.

Shiny happy people in HR land? You just love to see it.

So, the headline numbers you can use to benchmark your business:

• 86% of all leave requests are approved
• Outright refusal is rare, sitting at just 1.6%. (The remainder of non-approved requests are typically cancelled by the employee).

When a manager has to manually review a request, things move quickly: 

• Half of all manager-reviewed leave requests are signed off within 9 hours
•  62% are approved within a single working day

What does that mean for you? If managers are taking longer than 24 hours to review standard holiday requests, you are lagging behind the average, and your staff could be feeling frustrated. Those discount flights sell out quickly, and they could be booking their leave and their tickets within one lunchtime scroll.

The trend that hasn’t made it into the standard HR playbooks yet is that automation has quietly become normal

Our report found that nearly a third of all approvals now happen automatically, in bulk, or via self-approval.

For years, automation in HR software has been a bit of a myth. Bold claims to a futuristic dream. But our data shows that in leave management, it’s become an everyday reality. Companies are realising that for trusted teams, forcing a manager to manually click ‘approve’ on a routine Friday off is just… a bit of a waste of time.

So if you’re weighing up the pros and cons of automation, take a look below and ask yourself what you’ve got time for.

Whileaverages give us a baseline, the real insight comes from looking at the spread between companies. This is where you can truly self-assess where your business stands.

• 43% of companies typically approve leave within 4 hours. For these high-efficiency teams, booking a holiday is as frictionless as sending a Slack message.
• But roughly 15% routinely take three days (or more) to approve the exact same kind of request.

For an identical task – checking a calendar and confirming a date – some businesses move in minutes while others drag their feet for days. The request still gets dealt with (eventually), but how do the people involved feel about it? The manager with the constant nagging feeling of something they still need to do. The employee watching festival tickets sell out and prices go up. Browsing LinkedIn while they’re sat alone, ten rows back from the rest of their friends because they had to book their flight three days later.

Our data also uncovered a clear sticking point.

If someone submits a leave request on a Saturday, it sits for an average of 47 hours, waiting until the working week begins. Unsurprisingly, this creates a predictable traffic jam: the busiest window for leave approvals is Monday between 8am and 10am.

And here lies the catch: Monday morning is when managers are least free. They are catching up on emails, getting everyone into gear and setting out priorities for the week. The last thing they need is a raft of holiday requests in their inbox at 9am, and chances are it won’t be top of their list to sort.

But this problem is absolutely nothing to do with leave. It’s a scheduling and process problem, and it is entirely fixable.

Why does speed matter? Leave approval might seem like a low-stakes admin chore, but delays carry real hidden costs:

• Employee experience and trust: Waiting and worry are natural bedfellows. If a request languishes for days, it creates low-level anxiety. People can’t book flights, sort out childcare or make weekend plans when they’re stuck in limbo. Fast approval says we respect your life outside of work.
• Manager reputation: If Manager A approves in two hours and Manager B takes four days, employees will notice, and the inconsistency will breed resentment. Automation = consistency; consistency = fairness.

As with many things, success in leave management is invisible. When software and processes work as intended, you don’t notice them. Success is quiet, efficient and unremarkable. We can get so fixated on fixing broken processes that we fail to stop and appreciate what’s working.

The data tells a quietly satisfying story: automated leave tracking is a resounding success. It’s a task ticked off the to-do list, freeing up time so managers can focus on the things that actually matter.

Ifyou want to inch closer to that top-tier 4-hour benchmark, consider a few simple shifts:

• Set a clear expectation: Aim for same-working-day approval as the baseline standard.
• Embrace automation: Use automatic or bulk approvals as both a time saver and a policy choice that nods to employee autonomy.
• Flag the lags: Look for managers who consistently take days to clear requests, and help them unblock their workflow.
• Avoid the scramble: Encourage use of the Leave Dates app so employees can check the wall chart themselves before submitting, reducing manager hesitation.

Like insurance, you know leave management is being done well when it’s just not something you need to think about. Set it and forget it? Music to our ears. Booking and/or approving leave should take up a minute fraction of your otherwise busy and exciting day full of things that are definitely worth the brain power and space in your calendar. And that’s coming from people who love leave and could talk about it all day – but we still don’t want to spend all day clicking ‘yes’ on holiday forms, and neither should you.