Employees with the job status of active, joining and former use a license, whereas employees who are archived do not use a license.
You can check how many employees you have in the system in various ways.
The quickest way to see how many licenses you're consuming is by going to Licensing > Usage. Here you will see how many active employees you have versus how many licenses you have bought.
You can also view it on the new employee page.
To see which employees are active on your system, create a Data Export for the employee's dataset. Make sure you check the include inactive users in export. This will download a CSV of all employee information. The checkbox determines if joining and former employees are included in the export. Archived users never are.
An alternative approach, for smaller organizations who have enabled the Employee Directory in Appogee Leave is to count the users listed in the Directory. You will need to sum those in Joining, Active and Former states since all 3 states consume a license.
Licenses are sold in packs of 5 up to 30 and 10s when greater than 30.