How is attendance rate calculated?
Attendance rate divides the days somebody was present by the days they were expected, shown as a percentage. Twenty days present out of twenty-two expected gives about 91%. The arithmetic is trivial. Every real argument about the figure is an argument about what the denominator counts as an expected day.
Three candidates fight over the denominator. Approved leave, public holidays, and days where somebody worked but no record exists.
Most teams drop leave and holidays out of the expected count. A person on booked holiday was not expected, so counting the day against them measures the calendar instead of the person.
The third candidate is the awkward one. A day with a broken record looks exactly like a day somebody skipped. Both drag the percentage down by the same amount, and only one of them is about behaviour.
Agree the rule once, in writing. Nobody remembers an unwritten denominator by March, and two departments quoting different rules will spend a meeting discovering it.
The measure hides its own gaps, which is the trap worth naming. A day with no record and a day somebody skipped look identical in the total. Both pull the figure down by the same amount. So before acting on a low number, count how many of the missing days are missing records. In most teams that share is larger than anybody expects.
Read it as one number among several, not as a verdict. It says how often somebody turned up. It says nothing about when, nothing about how long they stayed, and nothing about what the day produced. Three other figures answer those, and all three sit on the same screen.
A rate built on a handful of days is noise. One awkward morning moves a five-day figure by twenty points, so wait for a full period before reading meaning into a percentage.
Read the rate beside the record count it came from, so the size of the sample is visible. Both appear together on the check-ins card rather than the percentage standing alone.
Related questions
What is a good attendance rate?
No benchmark worth quoting exists, because the denominator differs at every company. Compare a team against its own earlier months instead of against a number from an article.
Does a partial day count as present?
In a day-based rate, usually yes, which is why the hours figure is worth reading alongside it. A three-hour Tuesday and a nine-hour Tuesday score identically.
Can the rate be exported?
The underlying attendance records export to CSV, filtered by person, department, period or status. Anything computed from them can be rebuilt outside the product.