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In the United States Military, leave is permission to be away from one's unit for a specific period of time.

Under normal circumstance, all personnel are granted 30 days of leave per year. This time is usually used for vacations and other extended time periods away from the service that are longer than three days or need to be taken in the middle of the week. Leave is accumulated at the rate of 2.5 days per month. A member's leave is annotated in the monthly Leave and Earnings Statement.

Shorter periods of personal time away from the service are usually covered by passes, which are normally granted for normal off-duty hours in which one is travelling farther than the distance limit the Unit Commander has set in place. A servicemember may travel up to 250 miles on a 3 day pass and 400 miles on a 4 day pass. Passes can also be awarded to servicemembers for particular achievements. Although passes may be taken for up to 4 days, 3 day passes are granted on most occasions. When 3 day passes are awarded, they are most commonly taken over a weekend giving the servicemember one non-duty day of time off.

The four most common types of leave are: Ordinary leave which is regular chargeable leave time, emergency leave which is processed more quickly due to an emergency situation but still treated as chargeable leave, convalescent leave which is non-chargeable and only allowed with a doctor's signature that states the servicemember cannot return to duty for an extended period of time, permissive TDY, which is non-chargeable and is only used while traveling between stations while using their leave for government related purposes servicemembers using PTDY are not charged while on leave but are also not granted travel pay.

Leave time will "roll over" from year to year. A servicemember may carry up to 60 days of leave before he or she must take it. Leave in excess of 60 days is known as "Use or Lose", if the servicemember does not use the excess leave by October 1st he or she will lose it. Under certain circumstances, the use or lose threshold may be extended to 80 days, if the member is unable to take leave due to duty requirements, usually because of a deployment. If a servicemember leaves the military without having used all his or her leave time, the unusued days are paid for at the member's regular rate of pay upon separation. Conversely, though the situation is less common, pay will be deducted as excess leave on separation if too many days were taken.

Prior to separation or retirement from the military, a member may take the remainder of the leave they have. For instance, if a member's separation or retirement date is May 30, and the member has 30 days of leave accrued, the member may go on "terminal leave" beginning May 1. All their outprocessing from the service would need to be accomplished prior to May 1. Once they entered "terminal leave" they would essentially be out of the military, but would still collect a paycheck and other entitlements, such as basic allowance for housing, basic allowance for subsistence and medical coverage until their official separation or retirement date on May 30.