Available for the following HR Classic plans: Standard, Premium, Platinum
Available for the following User Access levels: Admin
Important
If you have joined Employment Hero on or since 1 January 2026, you will have access to the new leave experience. See here for more information regarding this.
If you joined Employment Hero before 1 January 2026, you will get access to the new leave experience from 4 August 2026.
Keeping leave records accurate is a vital part of staying compliant and ensuring your payroll is correct. To support this, we have updated the platform logic to:
- Prevent employees from deleting or editing leave requests that have already been approved or were previously approved that have already started, or have already ended.
- They can edit can edit/delete approved or previously approved leave requests that are scheduled to start in the future.
- They can only edit the end date of an approved or previously approved open-ended leave request that has already started. These are leave requests that were submitted with a start date but no end date, and approved without an end date. Editing the end date will resubmit the request for approval.
- Pending leave requests can always be edited/deleted.
Managers/admins can always edit/delete leave requests (pending or approved) until it has been processed, as long as it is not their own.
This update removes the risk of leave balances being incorrectly adjusted for time off that has already been taken or agreed upon with a manager and reduces administrative burden.
This article explains how to:
- Identify and view a secured leave request
- Understand administrator and manager permissions
- Distinguish between locked and processed record
Identify secured leave records
The platform automatically prevents you from deleting your own leave request if it meets either of the following criteria:
- The request is currently in an Approved status.
- The request is currently in a Pending status but was previously approved (for example, if you edited a request that had already been approved).
To identify if a request is secured, follow these steps:
- Log in to the Employment Hero platform.
- Navigate to the My Leave page.
- Locate the leave request and click the Actions button.
-
If the request is secured, the Delete option will be greyed out and show a lock icon.
-
Hover your mouse over the locked Delete button to view the informative message:
"You cannot delete an approved or previously approved leave request. Please contact your manager to cancel the request."
Maintain control over secured leave records and management overrides
While employees cannot delete their own actioned leave, Admins, Owners, and Managers (including users with Leave Management security group access) can still delete these records within the Leave Management module. This can be done in all cases except when the leave has already been finalised in a pay run.
There are specific rules for self-service to ensure a clear audit trail:
- Managers and Admins cannot delete their own approved or previously approved leave requests if they have a manager assigned to them.
- The only exception is for an Admin who does not have a manager assigned; they are permitted to delete their own approved leave requests.
If a correction is needed for a locked leave request, an Admin, Owner, or Manager can still edit the record. When a manager makes an edit, the system allows the change, but the request will then flow through the standard approval workflow again. All edits made by management are recorded in the system audit log to maintain transparency.
Navigate leave statuses and common administrative queries
The platform uses specific statuses to help you track where a leave request sits in the payroll cycle:
- Locked: This status indicates that the leave is secured because it was approved, meaning the employee can no longer delete it, but it has not yet been finalised in a pay run.
- Processed: Once a leave request has been included in a finalised pay run, the status changes to Processed. At this stage, the request becomes historical data and generally cannot be modified because the leave has already been paid out.
Why can I click Edit but not change the start or end dates?
The inability to change specific dates while in the edit screen is an existing platform behaviour that remains the same after this update.
Can I delete a request if the leave is still in the future?
Employees can edit/delete approved/previously approved leave requests that are scheduled to start in the future. This covers leave requests that have a start date later than today.
Explore related content
- Approve and decline leave requests as a manager: Learn how to action employee leave requests as a manager.
- Approve and decline leave requests as an admin: Learn how to action employee leave requests from the admin dashboard.