End Employment

The article provides a comprehensive guide on how to officially terminate an employee's employment in BambooHR. It outlines the importance of accurate record-keeping for reporting purposes and details the steps involved in the termination process. Key sections include navigating to the employee's profile, entering termination details such as effective date and reason, and managing access to post-employment information. The guide also addresses additional considerations, such as updating onboarding tasks, e-signatures, and approvals. It emphasizes the significance of the Final Pay Date for payroll customers and explains how to manage terminated employee records, including the option for a one-time edit access extension. Overall, it serves as a resource for ensuring a smooth termination process within BambooHR.

  • Jul 8, 2026
  • Knowledge

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End Employment
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This feature is included in the Core, Pro, and Elite packages.

How do I end employment for an employee?

Purpose: When an employee leaves your company, it is important to officially end their employment in BambooHR. This action will ensure the record is accurately tracked in reporting. This help guide will teach you how to end employment for an employee.

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If you are the Account Owner and are leaving BambooHR, please be sure to check out this guide for instructions on how to transfer account ownership before you leave.

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End Employment

Navigate the specific employee's profile. Click the action menu and select End Employment.

Add information

  1. Effective Date: Enter the date the employee's employment ends. You can future date a termination or resignation. The employee remains active in BambooHR until 11:59 PM (company timezone) on the effective date. When an end date is future dated, the employee still has access* and appears in the company directory and org chart until that date (see example below). However, if you enter and submit the termination/resignation on the same day (March 20th on March 20th), the employee's employment ends immediately in BambooHR and their access is removed. At that point, you can decide whether to grant post-employment access, which allows former employees to securely access their personal information, pay stubs, and tax documents for a limited time after their employment ends.
    • *If you future date an employee's termination and need to remove their access immediately, click Disable Access Now (as shown in the screenshot below), or open the action menu on the employee's profile, hover over BambooHR Access, and then select No Access. This removes their access right away.
  2. Type: Select if this is Resignation (Voluntary), Termination (Involuntary), or Death. If you select Resignation (Voluntary), an additional field will pop up where you can select if it's Regrettable (Employees you would have liked to keep, but decided to leave) or Non-Regrettable (Employees whose departure did not hurt the company).
  3. Reason: You can select from the available options, or add a new item if needed. See below for more information.
  4. Eligible for Rehire: Select Yes, No, or Upon Review.
  5. Reassign Direct Reports to: On the day after the Effective Date, all employees reporting to this employee will have a new line on their Job Information table with the new manager you select here. If you don't add a new manager here, a placeholder will appear for this employee in the org chart.
  6. Comment: Add any additional information you would like to record here.
  7. End Employment: Click End Employment to save the information, or Cancel to close without saving.

Encourage the employee(s) leaving your company to download their pay stubs and tax documents. After standard employee access ends, access to these documents depends on whether post-employment access is granted. All terminated/resigned employees will receive their W-2s by mail. This is an automatic setting for all of those who leave your company during the year.

The employee will not receive an email notification when their employment is terminated. However, if they have access to their Employment Status table, they can see the Terminated line of data if they log in and view that table. If you need to initiate offboarding, but do not want the employee to see this information yet, you can initiate offboarding by entering an expected termination date. Click here for more information.

Please note that when you future date an employment end date, this information will still pull into reports if you check the Show History box when creating the report. For example, if I run a custom report that includes the Employment Status table, then the Terminated status will pull into the report even if it is for a future date. However, the termination/resignation information will not pull into the Employee Turnover report until the employment officially ends in BambooHR.

Any user with access to view the employee's Employment Status table will see the future termination/resignation information. If they cannot access this information, they will see the employee as active until the effective date.  

Confirmation

Once the employee officially ends their employment, the following changes occur:

  • The employee's status changes from Active to Inactive.
  • The Employment Status table updates with a Terminated status and all termination information lists in the comment.
  • The suppression of any future time off accruals.
  • Standard employee access to BambooHR is disabled. If Post-Employment Access is granted, former employees can log in to access their personal and pay information for a limited time.
  • A new entry will appear on all the direct reports of this employee with their new manager. *This only happens if the employee being terminated has direct reports, and you selected someone to reassign the direct reports to in the End Employment modal.
  • After a defined grace period, the employee profile becomes read-only, limiting what can be edited. See below for more details.

You may need to terminate an employee before they start but want to keep their profile for your records. If this is the case, be sure you delete the future-dated line from the Employment Status table after you submit the termination information. Otherwise, the system will reactivate the employee on their entered hire date as it comes after their termination date.

Additional steps

Once an employee officially ends employment in BambooHR, there are a few items you will want to check to make sure everything runs smoothly without them. 

  1. Onboarding and offboarding: Is this employee assigned to any onboarding and offboarding tasks? If yes, update the onboarding and offboarding templates to reflect the new assignee. Additionally, do you need to activate the onboarding template for this new employee?
  2. E-signatures: Is this employee part of the signature workflow on any of your signature templates? If yes, update the templates accordingly. If a signature request sends while the terminated/resigned employee is still a signer, you will not be able to correct the pending signature request to a new signer. Instead, you will have to cancel the request and change the signature template before sending a new one.
  3. Approvals: Is this employee set as the approver for any of your approvals in Settings? If yes, update the approvals workflow to ensure requests are still running during this change.
  4. Access levels: Is this employee part of a custom access level group with responsibilities that need reassigning to another employee?

If needed, you can use power edit to end employment for many employees at once. However, be sure to carefully follow the additional steps listed above for each employee.

Can I add custom options to the Reason list?

There are two ways to add a custom option to the Reason list. One way is to click + Add Item within the Reason list when entering the termination/resignation details for the employee.

The other way to add a custom option is to navigate Settings > Employee Fields > Termination Reason. Type in the preferred custom option and click Add. You can also edit the Reason list here by hovering over a line item and clicking on the pencil icon.

Can I add offboarding tasks before ending an employee's employment?

You may have a situation where you need to initiate the offboarding process before you officially enter an employee's End Employment date. To do this, navigate to the employee's Offboarding tab and click Add Task List(s).

A modal will display and allow you to enter an expected termination date. This date will determine the task due dates. Please note this will not add a termination line to their Employment Status table. You can update that on their Job tab when you are ready for the end employment date to be visible to the employee.


The modal will also display all offboarding task lists and tasks. The tasks will be automatically checked if the filters for the tasks include the specific employee. You can check or uncheck tasks and lists as needed. Click Save Tasks.

Can I change an employee's termination date after it has passed?

Yes. If you need to update this information, you'll want to make the change in a few different places.

  1. Compensation table: End Date field on the most recent compensation table line.
  2. Employment Status: Effective Date on the Terminated employment status line.
End Employment fields for BambooHR Payroll customers

If you use Payroll, you will also see the Final Pay Date field. This field allows the employee to remain active in Payroll until the final pay date to ensure that they receive their final paycheck. There are a couple of things to note:

  1. The Final Pay Date field remains editable in case you need to make changes to ensure your terminated employees sync to payroll. Please note that if you need to make a change to the dates on the Employee Status table, you update the active line by clicking This is a correction instead of adding a new entry to the table (see Paying your terminated employees below).
  2. If an employee has a set final pay date in the past, they will be immediately updated and removed from payroll immediately.
  3. Ensure the End Date of the active compensation record (found within the Compensation Table on the Job Tab) aligns with the Final Pay Date chosen.
  4. Active benefit and non-benefit deductions that have no end date or an end date after the final pay date will automatically be set to have an end date that matches the final pay date. Active deductions with end dates already set before the final pay date will not be changed and will end naturally. 

If you would like a deduction to end prior to the final pay date, you will need to manually set the end date for the deduction on the employee's Benefits tab before the employee is terminated.

Terminated employees will receive their final paystub on the final pay date via email. Once they lose access to their BambooHR account on the effective date, they will no longer have access to their paystub history. We recommend having them download their paystub information prior to their last day with your company. Otherwise, the Full Admin or Payroll Admin will have to retrieve their past paystubs for them. 

Terminated employees will receive their W-2 by mail automatically. BambooHR will send it to the Personal address found within their BambooHR account. 

Example

For example, your employee's last day is on September 1st and the end of the pay period is September 5th for a pay date of September 10th. In the Final Pay Date field, you enter September 10th so that the employee will remain active in Payroll until they have received their final paycheck. In the case of a termination/resignation where a paycheck must be issued on the day of termination/resignation, you enter that date in the Final Pay Date field. 

Paying your terminated employees

After setting up the Final Pay Date when ending an employee's employment (see above), check to make sure the Final Pay Date field in their Employment Status table matches the End Date on their Compensation table. This ensures the employee will sync to payroll seamlessly. 

If you need to update the dates within either of these table, hover over the active record in the table and click on the pencil icon. It is important that you select the option This is a correction. This will update the active record instead of making a new entry within the table. Then, update the date if necessary and click OK. 

How do I pay out an employee the same day of termination? 

We understand that some states, like California, require you by law to pay your employees the same day as their termination.  We recommend the following options if you wish to terminate and pay an employee on the same day.

The first option is to process an off-cycle payroll and issue the employee a paper check. Navigate to the Payroll tab, create an off-cycle payroll for the employee(s) whose employment you are ending. Select the earliest available pay date based on your funding method (either two or four days out), and ensure the employee(s) are set up to receive a paper check through either a global update or individually on their Payment Details page. Once you approve the payroll, you can issue the employee a check from your company's check stock. 

If cutting a check is not an option for your company, you do have the option to set up a same-day wire and process the off-cycle payroll the same day as the termination conversation. This approach requires precise timing and entails the following steps:

  • Before ending employment for the employee(s), set up an off-cycle payroll run in BambooHR Payroll for the terminating employee(s). Choose a pay date that falls on the same day as the termination.
  • Configure the off-cycle to have a same-day wire funding method rather than a 2-day/4-day ACH method by contacting BambooHR Payroll Support ahead of the payroll due date.
  • Schedule the termination conversation before the wire funding deadline of 10:00 AM PST on the payroll due date. By 10:00 AM PST, you must approve the off-cycle payroll to ensure final wages deposit the same day into the employee's direct deposit account. 

Keep in mind that employees automatically receive email notifications when you process and approve payroll. You can process an off-cycle in advance to have a pay date on the day of the termination conversation; however, they may receive those emails in advance. To avoid this, use one of the methods outlined above.

Managing terminated employee profiles (read-only access)

After you change an employee's status to terminated or inactive, BambooHR applies restrictions to their profile over time.

If you need to make updates after an employee's employment has ended, you may request a one-time courtesy 30-day extension of edit access. This courtesy is available only once per account and cannot be used repeatedly for future terminated employees or additional extension requests.

After the courtesy extension has been used, any future requests for 30-day edit access, for any terminated employee, are available for $200 USD per 30-day extension. Contact Support if you need to request an extension.

Grace periods before read-only access:

  • 30 days: Accounts without Payroll or Benefits Administration
  • 90 days: Accounts with Benefits Administration
  • One year: Accounts with Payroll.
  • Immediately: If the employee is manually set to Inactive via the Status field on the Personal tab

During this period, you can still make necessary updates. A banner will appear under the employee's profile picture on their profile letting you know how many days remain in the grace period.

After the grace period ends:

  • Most employee data becomes read-only
  • You can still view information but cannot edit key employee data

Tabs impacted by read-only access:

  • Personal
  • Job
  • Custom tabs
  • Emergency Contacts

Allowed vs. restricted actions in read-only access:

Tab/FeatureAllowedDisabled
PersonalEditing contact information (phone, personal email, address)Editing basic information, work email, SSN, custom fields/tables, and profile picture
JobRehiring employees (via three-dot menu); requesting employment status changes (setting to Active), Editing Employment Status tablesEditing Compensation, Job Information tables, and custom fields/tables
Custom tabsManaging custom tabs and layoutsEditing custom fields, modifying existing rows, and adding entries to tables
Emergency ContactsViewing emergency contactsAdding, editing, or removing emergency contacts

If the profile is in the read-only state, you will still be able to manage existing documents and add additional documents if needed.

Removing data from terminated employee profiles

When an employee leaves your company, you may want to remove unnecessary data from their profile. To do this, you can use our Clear Employee Data tool. To do this:

  1. Navigate to the People tab and choose the List view.
  2. Click the three-dot icon.
  3. Select Remove Employee Data.
  4. Select the terminated employees whose data you want to update.
  5. Choose the fields you want to clear.
  6. Confirm that you want to permanently remove the selected data.

For more information about this process and the fields you can remove, click here.

Are off-cycle payrolls and terminations a persistent source of struggle, leading to late paychecks, frustrated employees, and major inefficiencies? If you're constantly worried about handling final pay correctly and meeting state deadlines amid changing regulations, it's time for specialized assistance. Instead of grappling with the complexities and high risks associated with these critical tasks internally, delegate this intricate process to a trusted expert.

Our BambooHR Services provide the expert guidance you need to ensure a streamlined, compliant payroll process, with a specific emphasis on simplifying off-cycle pay and terminations. This paid service reduces risk and saves you invaluable time, ensuring accuracy and compliance so you can focus on core business objectives with complete confidence.

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