this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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I put in for, like, three days of leave. I did this a month out. I want the leave in late March.
Apparently the answer is still no. How damn early do I have to do it for it to be a yes?
That's bullshit. An employer can only refuse an employee's request for annual leave if the refusal is reasonable. What's their reason?
That there’s no leave available. Too many other people want it.
But like…why is a month’s warning not long enough to avoid that?
Stop asking. This is your leave, that you have accrued. It belongs to you. You are advising them of your unavailability.
Respond to them advising you have given them X weeks of notice of your leave. Make them explain why they're trying to block you
This. I don't ask for leave, I tell. If you haven't got enough staff that's your problem, not mine.
They say too many other people want it around that time. Can’t lose too many at once, see?
But like…why is a month’s warning not long enough to avoid that problem and let me block out three days?
Copy and paste that second sentence into your reply email
Did they give a business reason for saying no? I don’t think you can just deny for whatever reason, especially over and over again, these are your rights to use.
They say that there’s no leave available. Too many other people want it around that time.
But like…why is a month’s warning not long enough to avoid that? How quick off the mark do I need to be?
I can understand that reason being given if you were asking for weeks off, but it sounds like a resourcing issue to me if it's happened to you over and over. You can't be expected to know when you need a few days of leave several months in advance.
100% a staffing issue. We’re chronically stretched
It’s become an issue since they changed up the leave booking system too, It used to be reviewed by a person, now it’s automated…and the leave-bot says no to things
Automating leave requests is ridiculous. It sounds like once an arbitrary number of staff are on leave on any given day, you get rejected? A business that's decided to run on lean staff numbers is not your problem when it comes to asking for three days of leave.
At my workplace you can't book leave more than 18 months in advance. If you have a specific date you want you can miss out 17 months in advance. You can generally get weekend shifts fairly easily because people want to work for the penalty rates, and if you can generally find a day or two available a few months out as long as you don't want it to be any specific date. If you need a specific day off you often need to arrange to swap a shift with someone else because getting leave is unlikely.
Cough, cough.... I see some sick leave in your future.
At least you're not being refused "because you don't have children" - apparently leave requests for parents get priority in some places. Nearly got trapped by that in one place I worked. Leave request approved, then suddenly cancelled because someone else had kids and wanted the same date range as leave. At the time, my workplace didn't know I had a family too. I really enjoyed ripping them a new one over that.
Seriously, a bot probably has a standard time frame for booking leave requests - and your request might have been just outside it - is one month the same as 30 days? - depends on the month. And a ranked list of requests stacked up to fill once it got freedom to grant leave. This list might well be ranked within the organisation, by tenure etc. too. Your request might have been just below the cut off point in the allowed parameters.
Doesn't make the situation any better or less aggravating.
I don't think they are actually allowed to do that, it's not legal to discriminate based on 'parental status' and that goes both ways.
My workplace doesn't do that, but there are different leave arrangements for 'high demand periods' over the school holidays. It's a ballot so that it doesn't always go to the same people though, not a discriminatory allocation.