Personnel Action Form Templates
Six free personnel action form templates for small business: new hire, promotion, transfer, pay change, leave and separation, with approval fields. DOCX.
Personnel Action Form Templates
Six personnel action form templates for small business: an all-purpose PAF covering every action type, a new hire and rehire form, a promotion, transfer and pay change form, a leave and return form, a separation form, and an approval authority matrix with a routing log. Every form pairs the current value with the new one and carries an effective date and an approval line. Editable DOCX. No signup.
The move that taught me to use one form was not a raise. We shifted someone from the warehouse floor to the front desk on a Monday, with a new manager and a small pay bump, and every person in the room agreed on all three parts of it. Three weeks later payroll still had the old department, his new manager was not receiving his time off requests, and nobody could say for certain which day the change had started.
A personnel action form is the fix, and it is deliberately boring. One page that says who is changing, what the change is, the date it takes effect, and who authorized it, followed by a short block that records where the change was actually entered. It is the difference between a decision and a decision that landed.
There are six templates here: an all-purpose form covering every action type, plus dedicated versions for a new hire or rehire, a promotion, transfer or pay change, a leave and return, and a separation, and an approval matrix with a routing log to tie them together. Each downloads as an editable Word document, free and with no email required.
What a Personnel Action Form Is
A personnel action form is the internal document an employer uses to authorize a change in someone's employment and route that change to everyone who has to act on it. PAF is the usual abbreviation, and employee action form, personnel action request and personnel action notice all describe the same page.
It is employer-side paperwork. An employee might trigger one by resigning or asking for leave, but the form itself is where the company records what was decided, on whose authority, and from what date. That distinction matters when you file it: the document is evidence of an employment action, not correspondence about one.
The reason to run one form rather than five is continuity. Filed in date order, a stack of action forms is a readable history of the employment relationship, which is exactly what the personnel file is supposed to hold and what an employee lifecycle looks like on paper.
The Actions a PAF Records
A personnel action form covers every change to the employment relationship, from the first day to the last. What varies is not the form but the work each action sets off after the signature, which is the column most templates leave out.
| Action | What the form records | What it sets off |
|---|---|---|
| New hire | Position, start date, pay, classification, manager, pay group | Payroll setup, tax and eligibility forms, the new hire report to the state, access and equipment |
| Rehire | Prior employee ID, prior separation, break in service, new start date | Reported to the state like a new hire, benefits waiting period checked against the plan rules |
| Promotion or demotion | Old and new title, pay and reporting line | Payroll entry, updated job description, org chart, sometimes a classification review |
| Transfer or reporting change | Old and new department, manager, work location | Approval rights and system access, org chart, a different pay group or work state |
| Pay change | Current and new rate, amount and reason | Payroll entry, overtime rate recalculated for non-exempt, notice to the employee where the state requires it |
| FLSA status change | Exempt or non-exempt, before and after | Timekeeping starts or stops, overtime eligibility, a salary level and duties review |
| Schedule or hours change | Current and new weekly hours, employment type | Benefits eligibility review, timekeeping, accrual rates |
| Leave of absence | Category, first day, expected return, pay status | Payroll status, benefit premium arrangement, coverage plan for the work |
| Return from leave | Actual return date and any changed terms | Payroll restart, accruals, access restored, schedule confirmed |
| Separation | Type, last day worked, effective date, rehire eligibility | Final pay under the state deadline, benefit end date and notices, access removal, retention clock |
Two rows carry deadlines that run without you. Federal law requires employers to report basic information on new and rehired employees within 20 days of hire to the state where the employee works, and some states require it sooner, using seven federally required data elements (Administration for Children and Families). On the other end, the state where someone works sets when their final paycheck is due, and the deadline can turn on how the employment ended: California, for one, requires all wages immediately on a discharge but allows 72 hours when an employee quits without notice.
The classification row deserves its own pause. Under federal rules, an exempt executive, administrative or professional employee must be paid on a salary basis at not less than $684 per week and the role must also meet the duties test (DOL Fact Sheet 17G). Check whether your state sets a salary level of its own as well, because where a state figure is higher it is the one that governs, and run the exempt or non-exempt check before the approval rather than after the first payroll.
Which Form Do You Need?
Match the form to the action. Someone joining or coming back: the new hire and rehire version. A move, a title change or a raise: the promotion, transfer and pay change version. A leave starting or ending: the leave form. A departure: the separation form. Anything else, or several actions on one date: the all-purpose form.
6 Free Personnel Action Form Templates
Download all six together or take the individual forms you need. Every file is an editable Word document, so you can drop in your company name, delete a section you never use, and print or send it as it stands. There is no email gate on any of them.
Template 1: Personnel Action Form (All Action Types)
The all-purpose version. A checkbox list of every action, a current-versus-new column layout, reason codes, two approval lines, an employee acknowledgment, and a routing block covering payroll, the employee record, benefits, timekeeping, access and the org chart.
Template 2: New Hire and Rehire Personnel Action Form
Opens the record instead of changing it: position, terms, pay group, benefits eligibility date, a rehire block for the prior ID and break in service, and the checklist that closes in the first weeks alongside the rest of the new hire paperwork. This form starts where hiring ends. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
Template 3: Promotion, Transfer and Pay Change Personnel Action Form
The action most often decided in a hallway. Old and new title, department, manager, hours, classification and rate side by side, a reclassification check, releasing and receiving manager signatures for a transfer, and a prompt for the promotion letter that tells the employee.
Template 4: Leave of Absence and Return Personnel Action Form
Built in two parts, because the work is only half done when someone goes out. Leave category with no medical detail, pay status, benefit premium arrangement and coverage owner in part one; the actual return date, restarted payroll and accruals, and confirmed schedule in part two.
Template 5: Separation Personnel Action Form
Closes the record. Separation type, last day worked, effective date, rehire eligibility, final pay with the accrued time question, benefit end date and notices, property and access removal, and the Form I-9 retention date, next to the rest of your offboarding checklist.
Template 6: Approval Authority Matrix and PAF Routing Log
The process layer. An authority matrix naming who may request and who must approve each action, with a threshold column for pay changes, and a routing log that tracks each form from approval through payroll to the filed record, plus a verification line for the first affected pay run.
Every template downloads as a Word file, which is also the shortest route to a printable PDF: open the document, then save it as a PDF. In Google Docs the same export sits under Download in the File menu. Put your company name in and delete the sections you do not use before you export, and keep the Word file as the master so next year's revision starts from something you can still edit.
What Every Personnel Action Form Includes
A complete form answers four questions: who the action is about, what the action is, when it takes effect, and who authorized it. Everything else is refinement around those four groups.
Two fields get skipped most often, and they are the two you will need later. The current value gets left blank because it feels redundant at the moment of writing, and the effective date gets collapsed into the date of the signature. A form that shows only the new title cannot tell you what the old one was, which defeats the purpose of writing anything down.
The routing block at the bottom is the third piece people cut, usually because it looks like busywork. It is the only part of the form that proves the change actually reached payroll and the employee file rather than stopping at the approval.
Effective Dates and Approval Routing
The effective date is the date the change takes effect for the employee, not the date anyone signed, and the approval is whoever your authority matrix names rather than whoever happened to be in the room. Those two fields carry most of the value in the form.
Where the action changes pay, align the effective date with the start of a pay period whenever you reasonably can. It saves splitting a period between two rates, and it makes verification against the pay stub trivial. Where the action is a pay decrease, the effective date is doing legal work. State wage payment laws, Michigan and Illinois among them, require an employee to be notified of a lower rate before working any hours at it, and a reduction applies going forward rather than to work already performed. The written notice itself belongs on a dedicated payroll change notice.
| Action | Who normally requests it | Who has to approve |
|---|---|---|
| New hire into a budgeted role | Hiring manager | Owner or department head |
| New hire adding headcount | Department head | Owner |
| Promotion with a pay increase | The employee’s manager | Owner, or a second approver above a set amount |
| Lateral transfer, no pay change | Either manager | Both managers, releasing and receiving |
| Pay change on its own | The employee’s manager | Owner |
| Exempt or non-exempt reclassification | Whoever runs HR | Owner, after a salary level and duties review |
| Leave of absence | Manager, routing the employee request | Whoever administers leave |
| Separation, voluntary | Manager, on receiving the resignation | Owner, as a notification rather than a decision |
| Separation, involuntary | Manager | Owner, with a review before the effective date |
Write your own version of that table once and put it at the front of the folder. The point is not bureaucracy, it is removing the recurring question of whether this particular change needs the owner, which is what causes a form to sit unsigned for a week while the effective date passes.
Records, Retention and What to Leave Off
Keep the signed form with the employee record, keep it for at least as long as the longest retention period that applies to you, and keep medical and sensitive detail off the page entirely. Four rules cover almost every question that comes up.
The Form I-9 sits outside all of this and follows its own rule: keep it for three years after the date of hire, or one year after employment ends, whichever is later, according to USCIS. Store it separately from the personnel file so you can produce it on its own, which is why the separation template has a line for calculating that date rather than a checkbox.
Retention is easier to reason about as one schedule covering the whole file. Action forms generally travel with the personnel record they belong to.
The Forms It Gets Confused With
A personnel action form authorizes an action; most of the documents it gets confused with communicate one. That is the cleanest way to tell them apart, and it explains why you often need two documents for the same event rather than choosing between them.
| Document | What it is for | How it relates to the action form |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel action form | Authorizes a change and routes it to every system | The internal record of the action itself |
| Payroll change form | Tells whoever processes payroll what changes about pay | Narrower and payroll-facing; overlaps on pay actions |
| Employee status change form | Records a change of status, hours or classification | Usually the same document under another name |
| Offer letter | Sets out the terms offered to a candidate | The action form opens the record once the offer is accepted |
| Promotion letter | Tells the employee about the promotion in writing | The action form authorizes it; the letter communicates it |
| Termination letter | Confirms the separation to the employee | The action form closes the record and drives final pay |
| Employee information form | Holds the employee’s own data, such as address and contacts | Employee-maintained, and never a substitute for an approval |
The pair that causes the most confusion is the action form and the payroll change form. If you run payroll in-house with a small team, one personnel action form is usually enough for everything. If an outside provider or a bookkeeper processes your payroll, keep the two separate: they get the pay-facing document, and the signed action form stays in the employee record with the approval on it.
Running It Without an HR Department
A large company routes an action form through a manager, an HR business partner, a compensation review and a payroll team, and each of them catches what the others miss. A business with eighteen people has an owner who decided something on Tuesday and an office manager who has to make it real by Friday.
| Challenge for a small team | Practical approach |
|---|---|
| Nobody owns the change once it is agreed | Name one person as the owner of the form itself, whoever else approves it |
| Decisions are verbal and get remembered differently | Write the form the same day, while the numbers and the date are exact |
| Approval routing is unclear for a mid-size change | Fill in the authority matrix once, with a dollar or percentage threshold |
| Changes reach payroll but not the org chart or access | Use the routing block as a checklist and date each line as you complete it |
| Forms end up in email, chat and a drawer | File the signed original in the employee record, in date order, always |
| Nobody notices a change was entered wrong | Check the first affected pay run against the form before filing it |
The advantage of a small team is that you can make this genuinely light. One page, one signature, one place it gets filed, and about ten minutes per action. That is enough structure to remove the two failure modes that actually cost money, which are a change nobody entered and a change nobody can date. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
From Signed Form to Updated Record
A signed form is halfway. The action is only done when the change is entered everywhere it needs to be, verified against the first pay run, and filed where someone can find it in two years. Four steps carry it there.
The templates work on paper, and plenty of teams run them that way for years. Where it strains is the routing: which forms are still waiting for a signature, whether the March promotion ever reached the employee record, and who has the current version. FirstHR keeps the signed form against the employee profile, captures the approval and acknowledgment with built-in e-signature so both are dated, and updates the profile, the org chart and the document record together. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider and not a law firm. It documents and stores the action; your payroll provider processes the pay itself, and decisions about state notice rules, classification and final pay stay with you and a qualified professional.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a personnel action form?
A personnel action form is the internal document an employer uses to authorize a change in someone’s employment and to route that change to everyone who has to act on it. It is employer-side paperwork, not a request an employee submits. One form covers the whole employment relationship: hiring, rehiring, promotion, demotion, transfer, a new manager, a pay change, a schedule or classification change, the start of a leave, a return from leave, and separation. What makes it different from an email is the structure. It names the action, sets the current value against the new value, states an effective date, carries an approval signature, and finishes with a block confirming the change reached payroll, the employee record and the org chart. Filed in order, the forms become a dated history of the employment relationship. This is general information, not legal advice.
What does PAF stand for in HR?
PAF stands for personnel action form, and it is the abbreviation most employers use in conversation and in file names. You will also see the same document called an employee action form, a personnel action request, a personnel action notice, or a staff action form, and in some organizations a personnel action form and an employee status change form are the same page under two names. The wording varies more than the substance. Whatever it is called, the document does one job: it authorizes a change to someone’s employment terms and creates the record of who approved it and when it took effect. If your team already calls it something else, keep your own name for it and standardize the fields instead. The templates on this page use the neutral heading Personnel Action Form so you can rename them in one edit.
What should a personnel action form include?
At minimum: the employee’s name and ID, their current title, department and manager, the type of action, the effective date, the current value beside the new value, a reason for the action, and a dated approval signature. The current value is the field people leave blank because it feels obvious at the time, and it is the field that makes the form worth keeping. Beyond that core, a strong form adds an employee acknowledgment line, a routing block recording who entered the change and which pay period it first affects, and prompts for what the action sets off downstream, such as a benefits eligibility review after an hours change or a timekeeping switch after a reclassification. The action-specific templates on this page carry those extra prompts so nothing depends on memory. This is general information, not legal advice.
Who fills out and approves a personnel action form?
The manager who wants the change normally starts the form, an authorized approver signs it, and whoever runs HR and payroll processes it. In a small business those three roles often belong to two people, which is fine as long as the form still shows who requested and who approved, since the signature is the whole point of routing it. Write the answer down before you need it: an approval authority matrix naming who can approve a new hire, a promotion, a pay change above a set threshold, a reclassification, a leave and a separation removes the awkward question of whether the owner has to sign this one. The employee signs an acknowledgment on the actions that are communicated to them, which records that they were told rather than that they approved anything. This is general information, not legal advice.
What is the difference between a personnel action form and a payroll change form?
Scope. A personnel action form covers the whole employment relationship, including actions that never touch a paycheck, such as a reporting line change or an updated job title, and its job is to authorize the action and route it to every system that needs it. A payroll change form is narrower and points in one direction: it tells whoever processes payroll what is changing about pay, deductions or withholding, and it is often what payroll wants to receive rather than a general action form. The two overlap heavily on pay changes, and plenty of small businesses use one document for both. If you run payroll in-house with a small team, a single personnel action form is usually enough. If an outside provider or bookkeeper processes your payroll, a dedicated payroll change form alongside it is cleaner.
Do you need a personnel action form for a new hire?
Yes, and it is one of the more useful uses of the form, because a hire creates more downstream work than any other action. The new hire version is what turns an accepted offer into a person who exists in payroll, in the employee record and on the org chart, with one page recording the position, the start date, the pay rate, the classification, the pay group, the benefits eligibility date and the approvals. It also carries the checklist that has to close in the first weeks, including the tax and eligibility forms and the report to the state. Federal law requires employers to report new and rehired employees within 20 days of hire to the state where they work, and some states require it sooner, so a dated line on the form beats a memory of having done it. This is general information, not legal advice.
What effective date should you put on a personnel action form?
The date the change actually takes effect for the employee, which is rarely the date anyone signed the form. Use the first day in the new role for a promotion or transfer, the first day of work for a hire, the first day of leave, and the separation date for a departure, and set that date on a line of its own rather than mixing it with the preparation date. Two habits keep this clean. Align the effective date with the start of a pay period whenever the action changes pay, so a single period does not have to be split between two rates. And where the action is a pay decrease, remember it applies going forward rather than to work already performed, and that state wage payment laws, Michigan and Illinois among them, require the employee to be notified of the lower rate before working any hours at it. This is general information, not legal advice.
How long should you keep personnel action forms?
Longer than the federal floors, which are shorter than most people expect. Federal wage rules require payroll records to be preserved for at least three years and the records wage computations rest on for at least two, while the federal recordkeeping rule for discrimination charges requires personnel and employment records to be kept for one year, and for one year from the date of termination where an employee is involuntarily terminated. A signed action form usually falls under more than one of those, and several states impose longer periods. The practical answer is to keep the forms for the life of the employment relationship plus the longest retention period that applies to you, filed with the employee record rather than in a separate folder of loose paperwork. Keep the Form I-9 separately, for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later. This is general information, not legal advice.