AbstractMuch attention has been paid to both non‐parametric and parametric estimation for survival data with right censoring, particularly in the medical literature. In manpower planning the completed length of service until leaving is of great interest, and here also the data are right censored since people are still in service when data collection ends. However, it often occurs that the data are also left truncated since people are already in service at the beginning of data collection. These people have often been neglected both in estimation of the empirical distribution function and also in fitting particular parametric distributions. However, it is important to include them so as to use all the data, particularly when data are only present for a short period.The methods developed were applied to data for the completed length of service of both skilled and unskilled workers where the data were collected over a period of years. Using modified Kaplan‐Meier estimation, applied to these data sets, empirical distribution functions were obtained. A number of parametric distributions were also fitted. The goodness of fit of these distributions as predictors of leavers and stayers over a given period was then tested using a chi‐squared