Time Off Request Form

A time off request form is the structured document an employee submits when they need to take paid time off, sick leave, personal days, bereavement, jury duty, parental leave, or any other approved absence from work. It captures the employee's name and department, the type of leave, the dates and total days, the reason, and a coverage plan that explains who will pick up their responsibilities while they're out. Done well, it replaces the messy email-and-Slack PTO chaos that plagues most teams under 200 people.

Traditionally, time off requests lived in three places at once: a Slack DM to the manager, an email to HR, and a sticky note on someone's monitor. Approvals were verbal, the running PTO balance lived in someone's head, and at the end of the year nobody knew exactly who took how many days. This is fine when you have ten employees. It is a disaster when you have fifty. Modern teams replace the chaos with a single form: one place to submit, one place to approve, one place to track.

A well-designed time off request form has three jobs: make submission frictionless for the employee, give managers the context they need, and create a clean record for HR. This Poper template ships with nine fields built around common leave types and includes a coverage plan section so managers can review quickly.

You can use this template as-is for small businesses without a full HRIS, early-stage startups, agencies, manufacturing shifts, retail stores, restaurants, clinics, schools, and remote-first teams — or use the drag-and-drop builder to add company-specific leave types and conditional follow-up fields. The form is fully brandable, works on mobile, and keeps requests in one dashboard.