1) Each permanent employee is granted 3 Personal Leave (PL) days per calendar year. Those 3 days expire on December 31 of each year. If you do not use those 3 days they do NOT carry over into the next calendar year and there is no path to recover that time; so make sure you use your 3 PL days during the calendar year or you will lose them. The good news: on January 1st you will receive 3 new PL days to use in calendar year 2025.
2) More good news, employees who received at least a "satisfactory" service rating will get a Step increase on December 27, 2024. Steps are not equivalent but generally they are roughly a 3% increase. Employees who are on the top step (Step 9) will earn a 2.5% Top Step Payment on 12/27/24 which will be reflected in your January 23 paycheck.
Some not so good news: in our 2016 Contract we negotiated to make the Top Step Payment a permanent part of an employees wages (so the TSP would continue when a contract expires). When our contract expired in 2021, the State did not pay the Top Step Payments and A&R filed a grievance. The guiding state statute 5-278a reads "salary, excluding annual increments" continues when a contract expires while the language added to our contract reads "Top Step payment...once earned shall be a continuing part of the employee's wages". The State contended that "salary" and "wages" were not equivalent. A&R argued that the intent of this agreed upon language was precisely to address 5-278a and that they were therefore equivalent. The arbitrator agreed with the State and we lost the grievance (and thus we lost language that we negotiated). As an aside, later that day, we removed the arbitrator from our panel.