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How do you feel about your PTO?
I was having a recent conversation with my friends about PTO and who thought they had too much or too little.
The results were interesting, so I thought I'd ask Tildes.
- Are you happy with the amount of PTO you get? Do you wish you had more or do you struggle to spend them?
- US and European PTO is very different, how do you feel about the other side of the pond?
- Do you like the format you get given PTO? Or is there a better way you'd prefer?
Let me know!
Edit: Thanks everyone for responding! So many interesting thoughts and different policies, it's really hard to reply to any specifically lol. I've read them all though!!
I work for a company that offers unlimited PTO. I've seen that practiced poorly, where you CAN take a vacation, but culturally nobody does and at you for pressured not to. I've already heard it described as a way to avoid paying cash value for accrued vacation time when somebody leaves the company.
In my company it's neither of those things, and I feel like my coworkers are all reasonable about their time off. But I find it PERSONALLY difficult to take time off. I regularly have bosses asking me (and others) to take more time off, but it's like pulling teeth. I guess ultimately I just feel like in a company of this size, a week off is just a week behind.
When I worked for larger companies with standard PTO policies, I usually got 3 weeks a year. I don't think that's a reasonable amount of time off for a person to have a thriving life outside of work. I'm not sure what is, but generally think that Americans work too many hours.
But isn't this exactly what unlimited PTO is about? It's not about preventing you from taking holidays, it's about implicitly creating a work environment where no-one feels like they can take holiday, while at the same time having lots of messaging saying you can take as much PTO as you like (and bosses coming up and telling you to take more, etc). That way you make the company seem attractive from the outside ("look, we have unlimited PTO, we're so flexible!") but in reality don't have to pay much in the way of holiday pay. Maybe you have to pay more for the handful of coworkers who do take advantage of that, but everyone else's stress about falling behind will make up for that.
Unlimited PTO is heavily dependent on company culture. Many companies do discourage taking time off explicitly or implicitly alongside an unlimited PTO policy, which is why they've got a reputation for that, but there are some places where the company culture is more relaxed and accepting of time off. In a workplace where you don't feel punished after taking PTO, an unlimited PTO policy can be a benefit in terms of flexibility (especially given that it doesn't limit your sick leave the way many PTO policies in the US do).
Here's why unlimited PTO is a scam, and a bullshit policy at literally all times, regardless of company size, culture, or implementation.
Say I work at a company with unlimited PTO, and I decide I'd like to see what South America is like.
I go to my boss, and say "hey boss, next month I'm going to go down to South America. I'll be taking the year off. Should be back around this time next year."
No company would approve that leave. My boss would say that I'm absolutely insane. So I go back to him and go "ok, how about six months", again, 99% of the time, he would say no, so again, "how about 3 months", again, no, you're insane.
Eventually we get to the point where I'm allowed to take a month off. So really I don't have unlimited PTO. I have 4 weeks. They just don't tell me that. I'm supposed to just intuitively know it, which means I can't plan for it, I can't rely on it, and I can't possibly figure that out until I take the job.
There's no company on earth that actually has an unlimited PTO policy, because there's no company I can get a job at and immediately take a few years of paid leave. There's always a limit, which is entirely reasonable. What isn't reasonable is not telling your employees what that limit is.
I mean, I don't think anyone is under the delusion that unlimited PTO is actually unlimited. I don't think it's necessarily fair to call it a scam given this, though the name is definitely somewhat misleading. Pretty much everyone knows that "unlimited PTO" actually means it's just the lack of a hard limit -- how much leave you can take is a flexible, subjective judgment call rather than set in stone. This was certainly reflected in the internal documents at my last workplace, for instance. The subjectivity in determining how much leave is reasonable is why it's so easy for companies with bad work culture to use unlimited PTO policies as a way to discourage employees from taking even as much leave as they would have at other companies with a hard limit -- but it's also why it can be so variable between companies. I prefer the large amount of leave I am mandated to take each year here in Germany, but given how many stories there are even in this topic of companies not respecting even the hard numbers of leave they offer their employees, I don't think unlimited PTO policies themselves are always awful.
This is about where I'm at. I feel like most of the comments in this thread are just hanging on the word "unlimited" and to be fair, it could be warranted based on everyone's personal experiences with the topic.
At my company, we have an "unlimited PTO policy". I see some people take two weeks, I see some people take six weeks. I wonder if people would have less of a knee jerk reaction if it was phrased as something like "PTO is at your manager's discretion". It's heavily dependent on your manager and how they operate, hence why it's easy to abuse.
Full disclosure, I'm the person that approves/denies PTO for my team (slightly over a dozen engineers). When requests come in I don't refer back to some tally and approve/deny based on that. All I care about are results and people not abusing policies that are trying to be generous because we all work in a rather high pressure environment. I have denied PTO before, but it was because of conflicts, whether it was a hard deadline during that request period or I wouldn't have enough coverage on specific teams, but outside of that unless "I feel" like it's not being abused I let people take their time to relax and recharge because, again it's a high pressure environment. If someone was putting in a request every other week, I would end up noticing and probably have a discussion with the person, but definitely not some kind of dressing down or complaint. In all my time of being this person, I've only seen it abused once, and that person was a poor performer in the first place. Not a bad person, they just did not acclimate well to the environment. Ultimately if I let people take too much time off, it's on me and I have to answer for it, not my team and I've never had a single instance where I've gotten push back from my bosses about my or my team's PTO.
And for full disclosure, I usually end up taking around six weeks and I take all major national US holidays as well.
I'm willing to admit that maybe my company is an outlier (it probably is to a degree), but after a decade in software engineering startups, I've never seen unlimited PTO policy abused to the level that most people discuss, though I'm sure it does happen because if there's one thing I can agree with most people about in this thread it's that American work culture absolutely sucks.
That's the thing though. If you truly have an unlimited PTO policy, people taking a ton of PTO aren't abusing the policy. They're doing the thing you explicitly told them was a benefit of the job when you hired them. If there's a problem with someone taking a monumental amount of PTO, the policy should explicitly state that. Otherwise you're just sort of relying on people to read between the lines and absorb that unspoken policy based on osmosis.
I'm a manager, and I've worked at places with both unlimited PTO policies and the place where I work now which has three weeks. I far prefer the latter both as an employee and a manager, because I don't have to approve or deny PTO based on general vibes, or some sort of internal accounting of how much leave a person has taken. If they have the leave, as long as we have coverage for their role, they can take the leave, no questions or strings attached. Same goes for me, if I have the leave, I take the leave.
You're right, I've never seen unlimited PTO abused either, which is why it's become so popular. It saves employers money because of unspolen social pressures to not take leave. If it didn't provide employers a benefit, it wouldn't be so widespread. That doesn't mean it helps employees at all though, it's quite the opposite.
Employers get to say they have an unlimited PTO policy which sounds great on paper. Notice how no one ever advertises it as a "social pressure and unspoken rule based PTO policy" even though the latter is accurate and the former is a straight up lie?
I get what you're saying, but this just goes back to the original thing I'm saying (and the OP I was replying to), that I feel like people are being a bit pedantic about the word "unlimited". No reasonable person is going to assume they can just not work at all and be paid.
To turn that around a little bit, should a company have to list every single thing you can and and can't do while "on the clock?",Everything you can and can't say, If you can wear brown shoes with slacks, or if they have to be black? On the third thursday of the month, you need to wear a clown suit. Sure they have section that will outline expected behaviors and attire, but it's far from exhaustive. It's usually amended as problems come up. I'm being a bit extreme to try to make the point, reasonable people should have reasonable expectations even if the policy title is "unlimited". The point, to me, is to allow room for managers to have discretion and not be rigid.
Does you policy state that PTO is three weeks, or that it's three weeks with the string attached that it's only if there's coverage? I'm honestly genuiely curious because I've worked in plenty of companies that had strict levels of PTO and none of them outlined anything that explicitly.
I do agree that social pressure can be a thing, probably more often than not, I've personally only seen it once in my start up tenure and it was crazy. I personally just took the time when I felt I needed it, screw social pressure, but I definitely also understand I'm probably speaking from a place of privilege especially being a software engineer (at the time at least, the market is trash now lol).
Apologies if I'm coming off agressive or dismissive, it's not my intention, this just feels like a kind of pedantic argument over the term unlimited. I can definitely be in agreement that it's easily abused, and probably is at a majority of places that implement it.
I mean ideally, yeah. You have HR policies that outline appropriate dress, appropriate workplace conduct, and so on. Ignoring that, PTO is a pretty core benefit of employment, probably only third in most people's priorities after salary and health insurance, so leaving it intentionally vague makes about as much sense as a policy that says to withdraw as much money as you want from the company bank account to cover your salary, but don't withdraw TOO much or we'll judge you for it and eventually fire you for it, and we won't tell you outright how much is too much.
It's three weeks, and when you take it is subject to your manager's approval. Most other managers approve most PTO requests, as do I, and if they consistently denied employee PTO, they'd probably get in pretty hot water for that. That's pretty standard for most companys' PTO policies.
It's really not pedantry. It's just that the term unlimited means a very specific thing, and it's not the thing companies mean when they say it. If this was something like the term "daylight savings time" where everyone knows we're not actually saving daylight, but it's not really being sold that way, and no one really stands to benefit, I'd agree with you, it would be pedantic.
In this case though, companies are attracting employees, especially entry level employees, with their generous unlimited PTO! policies. To most people, unlimited means one very specific thing, that is, that specific thing has no limits. If I have an unlimited data plan I can watch YouTube videos literally every minute of the day, and I will never be charged extra for that data. If I have unlimited refills, I can chug as many gallons of coke as I want until I throw up. Unlimited PTO not only isn't unlimited, it's not even generous in many cases. I've worked at places with unlimited PTO where people that would start getting subtle comments if they took a couple of weeks off. Their managers would talk to them if they took four weeks off in a year.
If that's your policy, that's fine, but then make that your policy. Some companies are more generous with unlimited PTO than others, but it's dishonest either way. Basically any other PTO policy implementation would be better.
I lean toward it being pedantic because I feel like no reasonable person would have this take when they see "Unlimited PTO" being advertised by a company. This thread feels rather polarized, like people are just missing the entire middle ground. Pretty much everything in a work contract is "subject to the company's approval." I don't see the need to append that to every single statement made in a company handbook.
I agree that some companies do use it as a way of attracting talent into a suppresive and abusive work environment and that's obviously a bad thing and those employers should be named and shamed as much as people can while keeping themselves safe. I'm not trying to say that never happens, however there is a massive middle ground where the policy is done in a reasonable way and not used as a lure to entrap people. Calling it a scam tilts the scale so far to one side that it doesn't leave room for any nuance.
I'm sure that it's done in a way that affords employees ample time off, but my issue there is then why not just give them ample PTO?
So like, if you work at an unlimited PTO company and you routinely take six weeks off, and no one has a problem with it, then why is your company's policy not just six weeks of PTO? How does it benefit the employee leaving that unsaid?
That's why I called it a scam. Yeah, you're routinely getting six weeks off, but how would a new employee know they could take six weeks off without looking bad? How would they know that six weeks off is reasonable, but eight weeks off is excessive?
Probably more commonly, how would a new employee know that they wouldn't get in trouble for taking six weeks off in a year? It's not outlined in the PTO policy, and like you said, most people know "unlimited PTO" doesn't really mean unlimited PTO. So how would they know that six weeks is the informal limit, and instead not just limit themselves to taking two weeks off a year because of a perception that doesn't match reality, that two weeks is the informal limit?
This is why I suspect companies do unlimited PTO in the first place. They enact this policy, then say "wow when we made PTO unlimited, people actually took less vacation! That must be because they see how much we value them and they like working here! We got to help our employees, and we're more productive! It's a win win!" In reality, they take less time off because the expectations are unclear and they're scared to.
I don't think you need to explicitly outline every single do and don't in a policy, but time off is a really important one to have codified.
To be clear, my problem with unlimited PTO isn't that people will abuse it. My problem with it is that it doesn't serve employees, its dishonest, and its largely a psychological trick companies do to attract talent with a lucrative sounding benefit that results in them actually paying out less PTO.
Unless your unlimited PTO policy is actually unlimited, (which as we've already covered, doesn't exist anywhere) that remains true.
Tbh I think the scam is not having to pay out accrued PTO. I had a previous company try to pull that, not with unlimited but by offering PTO instead of separate vacation and sick. If you take six weeks, cool. But if you take 1 weeks for 10 years and then leave, then they don't have to pay you 50 weeks of accrued time (or up to whatever cap they set)
Somehow the big international private prison company didn't keep up on IL law.
But i suppose it depends on the state whether that makes a difference.
I was waiting for someone to make this point. This is exactly it. It's a scheme to perpetuate wage theft under the auspices of a benefit.
If someone's allowed 3 weeks vacation and they only take 2 for whatever reason, they're entitled to a weeks pay to make up the difference. Unlimited* PTO allows them to weasel out of this liability. This is why it's a scam.
Lots of people here giving corps the benefit of the doubt when they don't deserve it. There's no altruism at play here. It's stone cold cynicism and watching their bottom line.
Whether or not someone gets paid out does depend on their state law as well as company policy... depending again on state law.
My state just happens to have very specific rules on that and had changed the loophole of PTO in August the year before I left the role. Some states may have zero protection for payouts.
In the vast majority of states, like 80% roughly, companies are not required to pay out PTO when an employee leaves or is terminated. In California, where unlimited PTO is relatively popular with tech companies, PTO has to be paid out but accrued PTO can also just be capped, so it's not a good reason to do unlimited.. just cap employees to 7 days or something, so there's no big liability on the books.
Source
Can you successfully hire workers in those industries offering them a max of a week of vacation at a time, ever?
I almost reflexively responded with “but a week is 5 days” because I’m too neck-deep in internal policy in my current job
I forget just how comparatively good Australia has it, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen capped PTO, and the closest I’ve seen would be “if you have more than 8 weeks accrued (calculated pro-rata for part time) then the business can ask you to take leave”, and therefore there’s pressure on managers from higher ups to let the employees take regular holidays, so it’s pretty rare to have actually abusive managers deny leave forever
I mean a week is 37.5 hours to me. I was aware but I was simplifying for the point.
We can cap out on 420 vacation hours at 37.5 per week (likely so someone can't be paid out a surprising amount tbh, as much as encouraging people to use it) but I'm a state employee so it's regulated state wide.
Good point. Guess in California a realistic accrual max would have to be something close to a realistic minimum PTO/year. So 3 weeks maybe? Maybe that's why California switch to unlimited then.
To that, I only have three questions: Is this the culture in all company departments, where do you work, and are you hiring? :P
(On a more serious note, feel free to answer #1 only. Since you already mentioned it being heavily dependent on the manager – is there a top-level “directive” for deciders with personnel responsibility, in the sense of for example “we recommend you allow 4 weeks off per employee, if requested, but no need to encourage”, or any variation of that? Just curious.)
Haha, this is a fair question. I can only speak to the departments that I am responsible for. So I guess to answer directly, I simply don't know. I have not heard of instances of PTO abuse or being strict, but I cannot say it hasn't happened because maybe I just wasn't involved in the conversation.
This also goes back to my statement that it's highly dependent on the manager and how they operate. Everything is subject to a manager's approval, even if company policy is a specific amount of PTO. Which I think might be where "Unlimited PTO" can go very wrong. Managers tend to be risk adverse and conservative. Myself, having been in early stage startups for about a decade (Pre/Post Series A) am just used to a different kind of environment, so I can't speak to larger more mature company cultures (unless you want to talk about Fintech 15 years ago lol).
I do not have any directive or guidelines from my bosses on about how much I should give each employee. It's very results driven. If I gave everyone a month off and we don't deliver on our committed timelines, it's my head on the chopping block (which is why I think as a company grows, they tend to become more controlling and conservative in their policies).
I don't see the benefit whatsoever to the employee. If the goal is to allow some nuance for how much and when you can take leave, just make leave subject to the approval of your manager, which is pretty standard across the board.
It shouldn't be on the employee to divine based on vibes what the expectation of them is with regard to leave. If taking a month of leave will look bad and mean the company won't view them as a good employee, then just say that by making a real leave policy. Leaving it open ended for people to figure out on their own just seems lazy, cowardly and dishonest to me.
But it sounds like the commenter is punished for taking PTO — not necessarily by their managers, but by struggling to keep up with the workload. So the company has engineered a situation where people generally can't take a lot of leave, but still feel like it's possible. They mentioned that they thought it was done worse in other companies, but if that example is what doing unlimited PTO well looks like, then it still looks like a very raw deal for the average employee.
EDIT: to be clear, my complaint is not about the "unlimited" part, it's about how the company seems to be applying implicit pressure to reduce the amount of PTO taken. That seems very dangerous and unethical to me.
Yeah, this is why I said it's up to company culture. Unlimited PTO has a bad reputation precisely because of bad company culture creating pressure to never take time off, as in the original commenter's case.
It's more likely about reducing financial liabilities. Unused PTO is a liability on the books, in the places unlimited PTO is popular it tends to need to be paid to the employee when they leave the company. Scrapping defined PTO and making it "unlimited" removes the financial obligation entirely, that people tend to take less leave is a fringe benefit.
In most places I've worked at, there's not been much ability to accrue PTO or to carry it over from year to year, which seems like a more healthy way of removing that financial obligation. If employees aren't using up enough holiday, then their bosses will typically encourage them to take more, in part because it's a lot easier legally if everyone just uses up all their holiday. And if they don't, then often some days can be carried over to the next year, or in rare cases paid out directly, but there's a number of restrictions on that.
The first place I worked at which did this was extremely careful to call it "unaccrued PTO", not unlimited. They would correct you if you referred to it as unlimited. They said it was California law that they could not keep track of what you'd used, if they did they would have to pay you something when you left. I was really unclear on this and nobody else seems to care about it, so maybe it's changed.
I spent months trying to get a straight answer of what they considered "reasonable". Finally I decided to use what I'd had at my last (government) job, 5 weeks. After I took 3 weeks, I got a talking to from the finance department because I was abusing the policy, so no end of year holiday for me that year. How did they know I was "abusing" it if they weren't keeping track? Timesheets.
Most companies I've seen using unlimited say that you can take as much as you want, so long as you get your work done. If you work efficiently, they give you more work. If you go above and beyond and work extra hours, they give you more work because you can obviously handle it. If you back off a little and someone notices, you get a bad review. If you don't have a shared workload, you come back from vacation with a backlog of work from the time you were gone.
One side effect I've noticed from this policy is that I feel like I have to justify my time away, I explain what I'll be doing. I hardly ever did this with normal PTO unless I was really excited about a trip. I think it's because if there's a conflict the manager will have to choose among the people who want to take time off. You usually win if you have plane tickets.
I love "unlimited PTO" talk. My current company has unlimited PTO. My last company had generous PTO, and the one before that had standard PTO but with a weird twist.
My current unlimited PTO matches your experience. I was hesitant with it, because studies show that employees usually take LESS time off. However, if you KNOW that's what happens and make a conscious effort to take time off, you'll probably be alright. That said, the time-off behavior comes from the top down. My boss in particular took a straight month off last year. In turn, I took off looks it up 31 days throughout the year (that's in addition to holidays). That's pretty good!
At my previous company with generous PTO, I took a normal amount of time off I guess. The best part is after I departed, I got a full paycheck's worth of PTO to cash out (80 hours). That's the biggest thing about my current job with unlimited PTO; I haven't "earned" any PTO that I'm entitled to. So I'm going to use as much as I can.
The company I worked at previously with "standard" PTO was something like 3 weeks a year with a week of sick leave. Strangely, one day we get an email from HR saying "hey everybody we're going to pay out your PTO and now you just gotta track it separately." Once again I got 80-ish hours' worth of extra pay in my next paycheck, and from that point on you had to coordinate PTO with your boss. Your boss was supposed to track your usage and slap down anything that exceeded what you're "supposed" to get, but in reality it became a quasi-unlimited-PTO. It was poorly enforced and I didn't mind it, but I left shortly afterwards so I don't know how that worked long term.
My company's like this and is pretty good about letting us take off. I also kind of struggle with utilizing that perk. Most of my PTO is either random sick days or taking a week off work around Christmas. I have a lot of gripes about my job and the company I work for, but the PTO policy definitely isn't one of them.
My instinctive response to this is to book well in advance and give your workplace plenty of notice, but then take more time off than your desk can be acceptably unattended.
I’ve never worked anywhere with unlimited PTO but I’ve been in the situation where short breaks just result in catch-up when you return.
My solution to that was to take much longer breaks — they can definitely leave your work to pile up for a few days or a week, but if you give 6-months notice that you’re away for 5 weeks in a row, that’s going to be a lot harder for them to ignore.
I have unlimited PTO but my spouse doesn’t, so in practice we’re limited to the ~3 weeks they get.
I take some time off in between vacations that they don’t, so my yearly PTO is probably closer to 5 weeks.
The best company I ever worked for had unlimited + every third Friday off. That was amazing.
My experience has usually been at companies in Silicon Valley offering “unlimited” PTO. In practice this means self-regulated PTO because obviously you can’t take off every day. But I’m comfortable asserting myself and usually perform well so I’ve had no issues getting 20 days off per year. 25 might also be possible without raised eyebrows depending on the year and company. Even though this isn’t quite European I can’t complain. My hours are usually relaxed, commute short, and the pay is always good.
Most people I know here pad their PTO by simply lowering their average productivity and skipping out on work occasionally when not in the office. I knew someone at Google who never formally took PTO and their boss never bothered to make them.
This is the problem with unlimited PTO, and I wish it would go away.
You don't have unlimited PTO. You have 4 weeks of PTO. That's fine, most (American) people would be happy with 4 weeks of PTO, but why then call it unlimited? The whole thing is pretty dishonest.
The "unlimited" part isn't about how much you can take at one time. It's more that there's isn't a limited pool to draw PTO from. You don't need to worry about taking two weeks to visit family in another state, then three months later, another two weeks to visit Car Henge, and now uh-oh, I don't have enough time left in my leave pool to go visit my grandma at her cottage this year.
I've gotta say, I've worked at a lot of companies with unlimited PTO policies, and at all of them, taking five weeks off in a year would at a minimum get me a talking to from my boss. It wouldn't be about the sheer time I was talking off, but it would be something like "wow, you're taking another week off? Hmm, do you think you'll make more progress on that project by then?".
But even if you did work at a place that wouldn't mind you taking off five weeks a year, wouldn't you rather just have five weeks of guaranteed PTO per year as the policy?
My point is that at some point, there is a limit. If they're fine with five weeks, would they be fine with six weeks? If they're fine with six would they be fine with seven? At some point, the company would tell you enough is enough and you don't get to take any more time off. That is the limit of your unlimited PTO, so why are we messing around and just not telling people that?
Completely fair point. I gotta agree: unlimited PTO is both subjective and not friendly to the employee unless there's a defined policy in place to manage employee expectations, at which point it's not really unlimited anymore.
Salaried employee at a Japanese company, I get 14 days PTO a year, no sick leave or any other type of paid leave other than national holidays.
I'm honestly a bit mixed on it. On paper, it's really not a lot, but in practice, it's been fine? Japan has a lot of holidays, so there are very few months where I don't have at least one 3-day weekend. I also work remotely with flexible hours, which means that I generally don't HAVE to take time off for things like dentist appointments. I'm required by law to use 5 days of my leave a year, but unused leave rolls over so I have a good amount of time accrued. The company is super cool about people taking time off, and people do take their days off. There's some weirdness about people taking unpaid leave, but the paid leave is very much respected and deadlines are adjusted accordingly without any sort of negativity.
There is a feeling that a week off is just a week behind, but that's less to do with the company and more to do with it being a small team. There's no one else doing my job or who could realistically do my job.
In the US. I currently have around 20 vacation days per year which increments a bit each year with the company and unlimited sick days.
I consistently use all my vacation days. Sick days are rarely taken because (knock on wood) I generally don’t get sick, instead they tend to be used when I have a headache or eye strain problems or something of that nature.
I wish I had more. Even with company holidays factored in it’s not really enough, because there’s different reasons for taking time off, with my biggest categories being:
The first category alone can easily take up most of my allotted time, because I find it takes at least 10-14 days away to fully “reset” and feel refreshed when coming back. Say you want to “reset” a couple times per year and they’re all gone.
I don’t think my productivity would suffer meaningfully if the number of days were doubled, or potentially increased even more than that. I’m so much more capable coming back from breaks that the difference would easily be made up.
This is pretty similar to my experience (19 paid days off, plus normal holidays, unlimited sick), and I feel the same, I could use more. I rarely take big, fun vacations as most of my longer periods off I dedicate to visiting family and the rest I end up using to make many long weekends over the year for mini-recharges (especially after paid Friday afternoons off got cancelled in my dept).
I'm also able to opt into a certain amount of unpaid vacation. The deducted pay gets taken out of my paycheques throughout the year, so normal pay isn't disrupted (it gets paid out if unused). I'm feeling such a need for a rest, this might be the first year I end up using it. We'll see.
I used to have unlimited sick time and about three weeks PTO. A number of years ago we switched to unlimited PTO and 5 days sick time.
Fuck that change. It was about reducing corporate liability.
I've had a few coworkers get cancer and be fucked by the new policies.
I make sure to file 5-6 weeks of total PTO, minimum, per year. It's my benefit, and I make sure to do my job. They owe me nothing and I owe them nothing.
I'm sure they'll fuck me if I ever need sick leave.
FMLA exists for a reason. As someone actively going through chemo, I've had to take about every other week off work. Realistically, that could be 2-3 out of 5 work days every other week.
It's normally fine... I'd love a couple extra weeks this year because of school, I have zero actual vacation, all my time is used for school.
I'm in Germany, and we get 30 days off a year. (More than the legal minimum, which is 24) No other restrictions aside from the normal stuff like clearing it with the colleague and such. We only really have "forced" time off for a few days around the Christmas holidays, and we can work if we want to, we just don't.
I don't have much to say about the US side of things, I don't have enough information. Every time stuff like this comes up I half-think it's made up because surely it can't be that shit, right?
Dutch here, same thoughts. I get 26 days but I can 'buy' (it's free) up to 3 extra with a bonus program my company does, which I always do so effectively 29 days.
Tbh I don't go on long vacations so I usually have like 17 days leftover early November, at which point HR starts poking at me that I should take some time off. Legally though we get to keep any vacation days from the year before up until July of the next year, so e.g. this year I'll technically have 35 days cause I took some with my from last year.
Thinking about across the pond is depressing. Well okay. The PTO can be okay sometimes, but it's the fucking existence of 'sick leave/days' that's absolutely mind-boggingly distopian to me. Why on earth you would get a limited amount of days TO BE SICK. LIKE THAT'S EVEN REMOTELY A THING YOU CAN HUMANLY CONTROL. is so beyond me. So even if your PTO is okay, you might still have to spend it cause some asshole coughed on you at the supermarket and you just have to deal with the flu for two weeks now but you also got flu from a different asshole 7 months prior, so fuck your vacation days I guess???
So yeah. I don't wanna play 'hate the americans' today, but I am willing to bet a not-insignificant amount of money that any European (well, okay, west/north European at least) considers the employee rights when it comes to e.g. PTO, pretty much appalling. And feel bad for y'all. This European does :(
US here: legally, there is no federal requirement for any sick or vacation time off. (Some states may have a minimal requirement.) Even federal holidays are not a requirement for employers to give employees off.
Hourly retail workers tend to not even get sick leave. They tend to run on a "three strikes" type system, where you can call in sick a certain number of times in a rolling period of n weeks (with it being one "incident" over a few days if you get a doctor's note). After however many strikes, you get fired. Beyond that, there's FMLA for an extended medical absence of several weeks (which you might get paid a reduced amount or nothing at all for), which requires a ton of paperwork.
I'm a salaried office worker, and my company has what would probably be considered excellent leave policies. I get ten annual sick days, federal holidays off, and about three weeks of vacation time (after three years at the company). And, realistically, it's just one bucket of no-questions-asked time. You just toss it up on your calendar.
Actually, I think the legal minimum in Germany if you work 5 days a week is only 20 -- you need to work six days a week for the legal minimum to be 24. But in practice, I think most places offer at least 25 days.
My favorite thing is how generous the sick leave is here, though. I know some of the health insurance companies have been whining to try and get it changed, but the freedom to take a day or two off as sick leave without any doctor's note is just phenomenal.
Okay so this is a German thing that I also find insane - a doctor's note?!
Do y'all just go out if you have a temp of >38°C on day 3/8 of the fucking flu and sit in a doctor's office to get a note?? If my boss asked me to get proof that I was actually sick I'd show up to work and vomit on them LOL
I mean, I said I was happy you don't need a doctor's note. You only need a doctor's note if you're off for more than 3 days in row (a point at which you'd probably benefit from going to your GP's office hours for acute patients, which almost all practices offer in the mornings, anyway). The actual notes are electronic these days, and I think it's possible to get them done remotely nowadays, but I never actually needed to do that at my last job so I don't have firsthand experience with that.
You have a few days before you have to actually visit the doctor, but you need a doctor's note (it's all digital now, of course) to get the paid sick leave. Visiting the doctor also means you get a treatment plan, though of course for a cold or flu it's not gonna be anything special
Ahh, so its just a checkin with the doctor and you dont actually have to go? Alright alright thats a lot more fair, hah. We have something similar, like a 'work doctor'. If you're sick and it's not just a flu (e.g. over in 5-7 days) you meet (can be digital) with the work doctor and together you figure out a plan to what you need and how your work can support you. Its essentially the same thing, except they also help with like burnout etc.
It depends a lot on the doctor. My doctor insists that you come in and speak to him to get a sick note, but then he was also open with no particular restrictions throughout COVID, so I'm not sure if he actually understands how contagion works - I should probably get a new doctor! I know of other doctors that are fine with you just calling up (although the Government are trying to restrict that a bit).
You also have a couple of days that you can take off without getting a note, and only get a doctor's note later if the illness sticks around for longer.
It can be a good system in that it makes it easier to relax when you're officially written off sick - you can spend a few days concentrating on getting better rather than worrying about whether you should be going back already. But it does encourage turning up in a waiting room while ill, which should probably be avoided more.
This so much. Say you rock up on friday on your third day of being sick. Your doctor might tell you to stay home all of next week, if they think that's the amount of rest you need to get better. Which is miles better than a more informal "oh, just stay as long as you need to get better", because then every morning you play the inevitable game of "am I fine yet?", and you think you're fine, only to feel like dog shit come 5 PM. Whenever I have the pressure to actually get work in, I tend to play this oscillatory game of "I'm fine", "lol you're not, get back to bed" for a few days at the tail end of any infection. When I don't have that pressure, I think recovery actually goes significantly faster.
The other nice thing in Germany that I get to take advantage of this/next year is parental leave. Between your child's birth and their 8th birthday, you can take up to three years' worth of parental leave (with some restrictions — it's typically easier to take it in the first 2-3 years).
You can only get paid (at a reduced income) for up to 14 months, shared between both parents, and I get the impression that most people take fairly close to that minimum, but it's nice to have the flexibility to take longer and not have to worry about your job disappearing behind your back, or having to search for a new job afterwards. Unfortunately, it's mostly only taken up by women (there have been attempts to change that — for example, you only get the 14 months if the father takes at least two of those months, otherwise it's only 12 months' leave), but men can and should use the opportunity if they're financially able!
Yeah, we've had a couple male colleagues take multiple months as parental leave in the past few years - it's great to share the early months of the baby between the parents, because it can be overwhelming
My time to shine as I have one of the worst deals I know of...
US on W2 with a tiny company.
10 days that can be used as PTO or sick (combined, so just the 10 days total. I can't use PTO as hours, only full days. Hardly any holidays. Company is so small I don't have OSHA protections, so this is legal, as well as the 1-2 times a year I have to work 10 hours on a Saturday because our customers are dumb and can't do after-hours work quickly.
Health plan is so garbage that I get a plan off the (Government) Healthcare Marketplace instead. And that plan is still garbage, to the point I've contemplated having no insurance- nearly $700/mo for myself and my partner, but the copays are high and most labs and procedures are "co-insurance" the actual cost is a mystery until it happens. My partner had a sleep study last year and the charge for us was over $1k.
What I really want people to understand about these plans is they make poor people poorer. These are the only plans available if your employer doesn't offer insurance. Even though people below a certain income level get the premiums subsidized, they are still subject to the insane copays and co-insurance I mentioned.
As an example of how different this can be, my partner worked a gov job for a bit and the premium was $0 for my partner and ~$35 to add me. And the coverage was phenomenal- low copays, nearly all meds covered, labs and tests were all <$50.
Needless to say, I'm looking for another job. I'm in my last semester of school working towards a Bachelor's. I'm hoping that will make job hunting a bit easier. And even if I take a pay cut at my next job, if I'm able to save ~$500/mo on healthcare, that's effectively a $6000 bonus.
Oh dude, dude, I hope you land a dream gig immediately. What an awful way to keep most poor people continually poor
So, I'm lucky in the sense that my employer pays pretty well, at least for my skill level and what I'm doing (imo). But it's still a tough pill to swallow to pay that much for medical.
I just feel really bad for the people who truly can't afford this and have no other options.
My last job was almost as bad. 10 days of vacation was the most ai had ever gotten, we had zero holidays because holidays were peak sales times, except we might have half-days where we close early on some of those holiday because nobody is coming in which means you only get paid for half the day. We did have Kaiser insurance, which was good because in the region it was the best offering. It wasnt their best plan but it was good enough, perhaps a benefit of the company being owned by a very old man with many health complications. We did also have sick days, but for some reason the state lag seems to have capped it at two days per year? I would always max it out because I would get frequent ear infections.
In any case, even with these allowances, it took way too much out of me. I quit with no plan for the future because I was dying from the stress. Living like that for so long really makes me want to go tell all the people complaining about the limitations of their unlimited PTO policy to go fuck off. But it’s really not their fault, it’s the country’s fault for not mandating better PTO policies for workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Sir Terry was a man ahead of his time in a lot of ways.
So here's the breakdown of how my PTO works, I am in the U.S
30 vacation days,
3 personal days,
10 sick days,
2 family illness days.
I can carry 5 vacation and unlimited sick days into the next year.
I like this format, I'm not scrambling to use a general pool of hours depending on what I need to use the days for.
I would prefer the European way of doing PTO.
UK here, also recently changed jobs so will cover old and new for what I can remember.
Old Job:
30 days holiday, plus bank holidays. This increased from 20 days when I first started. Service length needed to reach 30 days was reduced down to 5 years during my time there.
New Job:
Currently 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, increases with service.
As for sickness leave, 26 weeks is full pay, and you only need a doctors note after the first week.
Both companies allow the "purchase" of additional holiday as part of their benefits programs, but not something I've ever felt the need for.
I get 2 days of vacation and 1 of sick a month, plus 40 hours of "whatever I want" during each year that's protected by the state.
I used all my sick when my partner was in the hospital, but I've accrued it back up. I haven't been ill (i refuse to) much myself.
I'm currently maxed out on my vacation and in fact I've just been using it for sick lately. Since the pandemic, I haven't traveled much since my partner's disability. I haven't traveled for fun at all, And it's hard for me to take time off personally for long periods of time. So that's something I'm working on between me and my therapist, but my supervisor and the department has always been incredibly supportive and in fact pressing me to make sure I take time off.
I make sure my team gets to too.
Also I get from around the 23rd of December through the 1st of January off, sort of in trade for not getting all the state holidays I've always assumed. It varies a bit with weekends.
I like it fine, I am not micromanaged and I just need to let myself take more time off.
ETA: Public university in IL
I'm in the US and work for a currently-held private company whose hedge fund is in the process of selling us to a public company...
My PTO is amazing. My health care benefits are amazing. I've been with the company over 5 years, and the intro (under 5 years) level of PTO is 4.85 (that may be off by a bit) hours per 2-week paycheck. Currently I'm earning 6.92 hours, and when I hit 10 years (2029) it will bump up to around 8.
They used to let you purchase PTO at cost, and raises go in in March, so you used to be able to buy PTO and keep it and when you quit 20 years later, you paid original prices for but get the cash out of your current wages. Apparently this was triggered by the IRS as being "not okay", so I only have 160 hours there. But, still, every year you're allowed to buy up to 80 hours of PTO, which is divvied over the year... so I pay my current salary rates and it is divested back at me sometime in December. I never use it, as I always have plenty of normal-issued PTO, so I basically get a paycheck at the end of the year that I "saved up".
Thing is, I'm really leery about the up and coming purchase and how that's going to affect me personally... it will make my business life easier, as the current company is cheap AF, but the reason we can't get funding to keep a lot of things tip-top is because we're enjoying these bonuses being run by a hedge fund...
All that being said, I top out at 192 hours of PTO, and I have enough vacations planned out this year that I will dip down to about 30% of that and get up to almost 60%. (That also increases into the 200s after year 10, but not an issue quite yet.) I did have to take some days off before I hit the 5 year mark due to the previous max PTO being 168 hours. But, it makes me realize I am definitely upper middle class and I have great options.
I work for an Australian company in America that offers us unlimited PTO. Like any other company its not truly unlimited but they don't closely monitor you on it either. I feel my team and manager are pretty good about us taking time off. They often encourage us to take a few days off here and there and take things easy when we can. I think on average, people on my team will take ~20-30 days PTO throughout the year. Our team also doesn't care about # of sick days taken so I often see people logging off early if they're not feeling well which is good.
Since my PTO is unlimited, I don't have to wait to accrue time off which is nice. I have friends in other companies across the US and we have to plan our trips around their PTO policies which can be a bit annoying at times. They have to schedule things to minimize the amount of time off they take since they only get a certain number throughout the year.
Regarding the other side of the pond, it would be nice if the US had some similar federal-level requirement for PTO. It would also be cool to have something akin to Australia's long service leave. I'm looking at this purely through a naive American perspective, but it does seem like a cool benefit. In essence, you get extra time off accrued based on how long you've stayed at a company. It gets added onto their federal requirement of 4 weeks of PTO, which also rolls over year to year. I know in Melbourne (maybe Victoria as a whole?) you accrue 6 days of PTO every year for long service leave and you can then use it after 7 years of employment. My colleague in Melbourne recently hit 7 years at our company and so they took their long service leave along with some of their PTO they accrued over the years to take like 4 months off. If you tried that in America you'd lose your job immediately haha.
UK, full time employee, I get 33 days leave plus bank holidays (so 41 days compared to the legal minimum of 28). New starters get 28 plus bank holidays (i.e. 36) and one extra day per year with the company until you hit the 33 day cap. That doesn't include sick leave, which does have a limit to being paid at full salary but I have no idea when that limit is. An average amount of illness doesn't come close in any case.
It often feels a little excessive, especially given how we can flex our schedules to take time off in lieu (of overtime) at the discretion of our individual managers on top. And we can only roll over 5 days, so I'm often working short weeks come December just to use it up without leaving myself a huge pile of work to come back to.
Salary retail manager in Canada working for an American company. I have the same 15 PTO days that I started with 6+ years ago as I never got it in writing when I started and had to fight to keep it a couple years back, so that was annoying. I don't love that.
I do also get 6 sick days and 12 holidays off, so solid enough. I can carry over 75% of PTO to the next year.
I don't know what would be better aside from more PTO days.
I have split vacation and sick days that both accrue at a rate of 8 hours per month. We also get two personal holidays and most federal holidays off, paid (US, municipal employee). Once you complete 4 years of service, vacation accrual goes up a fraction so you get 15 days total per year, and it increases every few anniversaries until you hit a point where realistically it accrues faster than you can use it (I have a coworker who takes every other Friday off to use it instead of losing it, since you can only roll over so much to the new year).
I think this is fine / great as a public sector employee. 12 days of vacation is decent for one longer trip and a few little ones. I'm definitely looking forward to more eventually. The sick time is adequate and I think the amount of hours you can bank is equivalent to where if you hit that point, you'd be eligible to file for their short term disability benefit. So ideally if you can build a big enough bank, there would be no gap in pay if something happens. Doctor note is required after 3 days of absence not covered by FMLA. After a small fight, they recognized my migraines were FMLA- eligible (no one likes long-term conditions) so while I usually use my sick days for those and accruing a decent amount of sick leave is tough, at least they can't fire me over attendance.
My last job was for a law firm where I was one of two full time employees. We had the state minimum mandated sick pay (6 days per year ish), no holidays, and I think ten days of vacation accrual per year. I ended up taking a lot of unpaid time off. I don't think I'll be going back to the private sector if I have anything to say about it.
Edit: Current job also has paid bereavement leave for loss of immediate family and grandparents/great grandparents. I think 40 hours per occurrence. This is extremely valuable to me for reasons I won't get into here but I'm very grateful for this policy. It definitely strikes me as the city being true to its values and treating its employees like fellow humans.
The company I work for gives 5 days after 90 days, then 5 more after 6 months, then 10 each year until 5 years where you start getting 20 per year, then in another 5 years you get 30 per year.
Comparing to other companies, it is close to standard, maybe a little above (at least in my industry).
I enjoy it (I'm at the 30/yr bracket) but I do wish we had more, and I wish we had more maternal leave (I think it's 2 weeks?) and any paternal leave (my paternal leave was just me saving my days off to use when the baby got here...).
Comparing to those 'across the pond' is a bit hard to do because of other benefits (basically higher pay, though that's offset by health care costs, but some of that is offset by taxes depending on where we are comparing, etc etc so it's hard to do), but generally I think it's better in non-US places. Like I said, I wouldn't have minded a month or 2 off to help with my child instead of sweating over the fact my PTO is drained until it resets.
Having said all that though, my company has helped me out in the past and basically 'looked the other way' when my father in law was in the hospital fighting for his life and I ended up taking nearly 3 weeks off (practically living in the hospital waiting room) - I thought I was going to get fired (fairly new at the company at that time) or at minimum just have no PTO for the next year but they didn't even bother deducting anything from me and paid me in full. They also looked the other way when my wife had to stay in a town several hours away for her cancer treatments and I had to solo parent 2 small children, I was frequently away and no one ever complained.
I think it's a rarity for this to have occurred but I am also a good employee so I think they just wanted to make sure I didn't split. In any case, I was grateful for their understanding. So I can't really complain too much about my rather "flexible" 30(ish) days per year.
United States, South Carolina, federal contractor
I’m a salaried employee, and our PTO is combined vacation and sick leave. You start with 160 hours (four weeks), accruing half the time every six months, and every five years you see an increase in your time (I’m at 184 hours). We also get 11 paid holidays (New Years, MLK Day, President’s Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day). There’s talk of adding a floating holiday as well. For S.C., the PTO is considered quite good.
Work for a large university in PA.(USA)
20 vacation
3 personal
10 sick
Up to 10 vacation days can roll over. Personal are use or lose. Sick days bank unlimited.
However. If we use more than 6 sick days per year we are subject to increasing disciplinary action (from verbal warning to termination on the order of 5 violations) unless on FMLA or other medical leave.
When you have a family of 4, all of whom I'm allowed to use my unbanked sick days for, this is incredibly tight. So I basically burned most of my vacation days this year covering sick days for me and my kids. Because children at school are non-stop disease factories.
I'd just as soon they only give us 6 sick days instead of this incredibly shady policy.
Yeah, I mean, isn't the entire point of a policy to outline what you can do before you get in trouble? If your policy is that you have 10 sick days, but you get in trouble if you take more than 6, don't you just have 6 sick days?
It's like saying murder is legal in this state, but you may go to jail if you do.
WTF is that sick policy?!
That's so different from our policy in IL (after five days in a row you're required to bring doctor's note clearing you to return which sort of "proves" illness but is also confirming you can do the job again)
Interesting. I work for a large public university. I have been here for over 20 years.
I accrue 13.5 hours of vacation a month, which works out to 20.25 days a year. We can carry over 240 hours (30 days) on our anniversary date, but if you have over 240 hours you lose those additional hours. I know people that have had to take off a day every week for a couple months to avoid losing time. Any vacation time is paid out as long as you leave on good terms.
I accrue 9.2 hours of sick time every month. We have no maximum on sick time, but it is not paid out at the end. Using it is really up to your manager or department, how strict they get as far as requiring doctor's notes, etc. I have been lucky in my time here that I have not had a manger be too strict about it, but I've also never really abused it. In my current department we are encouraged to take sick time for "mental health" and I will use that occasionally to give myself a long weekend. I have also had no problems taking time off when my kid is sick or has doctor's appointments.
Overall I am happy with the PTO/sick time setup here, but I have a fear it is going to start changing soon, given our current leadership and state government.
US employee, salaried
25 PTO days
5 personal days
10 sick days
16 weeks parental leave (both birthing and non-birthing parents).
I think compared to other companies I’ve worked at, the health benefits could be better but I really shouldn’t complain. My job only offers high deductible plans for premiums I would expect to pay for… not high deductible plans. We have incredible coverage though, so like I said: I shouldn’t complain.
Also, they match every dollar I contribute to my 401k (up to 6% of my salary) with $1.67.
Truly wild benefits for living in the Midwest (in my limited experience).
(Europe) Well, I’m a teacher, so I don’t get any, but have a lot of holidays and don’t actually have to go to work every day of the week either. Calling in sick is a non-issue, but I should provide tasks for my students while I’m off. It’s nice.
For anyone (like me) who doesn't know what PTO stands for: "Paid time off, planned time off, or personal time off, is a policy in some employee handbooks that provides a bank of hours in which the employer pools sick days, vacation days, and personal days that allows employees to use as the need or desire arises." - Wikipedia
I generally don't take much time off. Maybe a week and a half a year.
I don't even really know how much I get because I don't use it much, but probably around 3-4 weeks a year.
If I take a day off, I come back to about 200 unread emails I need to sort through. Things just kinda languish and don't get accomplished, and I'm just buried under work when I get back. This gets multiplied based on how many days I take off, so the one time I took a full work week off, my work life sucked for weeks afterwards. I'd rather just stay on top of it honestly.
This means I have around two months of PTO currently banked. I think I can keep around six months before I hit the cap, and when I leave my organization, that will get paid out to me, which is nice.
Ugh, the fact that nobody would cover my work when I left was a huge killer for me, too.
Right now I am thinking of getting a better job because the one I am working doesn’t really give me enough hours and the nature of it doesn’t really handle scaling up very well even if I did get them. But I was so burned with the last job I really don’t want to even search anymore.
Europe here. 27 days annual leave (grade and age dependent), sick leave is paid for a few weeks. We also have flexible working hours and can compensate overtime with 1:1 time off later (with additional compensation for weekend/unsociable hours). There's also a mandatory requirement to take 2 weeks off in a row at some point in the year. It's not a bad idea, but in some years, I'd like to take off more one week breaks here and there and 2 weeks in a row reduces that capability.
Overall, I don't think it's enough especially with the amount of public holidays here (up to 10 per year but not very spread out), which are lost if they fall on the weekend - Christmas/New Years being on a Saturday is rough. From August until Christmas, there's no public holiday so work just seems to drag on.
I'm in the US and I get 3 weeks PTO, 5 sick days (California Mandated), and 3 "wellness days". I can only carry over the PTO, the rest is use it or lose it. I take all of my allotted time each year because that is part of my benefits package.
Unfortunately, we don't get that many holidays off though. We get New years day, memorial day, 4th of july, labor day, 2 days for thanksgiving, and christmas day. I would be less upset about how few holidays we get if we had 4 day work weeks.
I have been with my company for over five years, so I get 3 weeks of vacation a year, unlimited sick time.
On top of that, I also receive 1 free day to use whenever, and then two extra days of my choice at the end of the year between Christmas and New Year. I have the option to buy up to one week of vacation but I have not done this in recent years, since last year I did not take much vacation at all. We have a limit to how much we can accrue, that being 240 hours total which I should hit in October. However, I figure if I can get 5 weeks queued up, then I can just start taking at least one day off a month for an extra long weekend, and 3x a year taking two days off a month for two weeks of extended vacation. Combine that with the company holidays and I am sitting pretty nice with vacation time for the foreseeable future.
I'm fortunate that I work remote so I don't get the feeling of burnout too often anymore. Having the freedom to work outside when it is nice and sunny, play a game during my lunch break, and cook food throughout the day, I have very little reason to vacation at this point except when my wife has the availability at her job. We were planning to go to Europe for 3 weeks to visit her family, but at this point we don't feel comfortable coming back into the US with her green card status and the uncertainty of the future.
US employee, salaried.
16 PTO days, combined vacation/sick time, accrued at the rate of 1.5 days/month.
7 paid holidays
The only reason I have 16 days after five years is that I was granted credit for time at my previous job; otherwise, I'd only have 10 PTO days per year. No rollover from one year to the next.
It's a Midwestern non-union private company. The marginal PTO benefits are typical of the region, though pay and other compensation (bonuses, 401k match, profit-sharing) are substantially better than average.
As /u/slade mentioned, I find it personally difficult to take time off. Our office had 50% layoffs last year. Most of the projects are now handled by a single technical professional, so even temporary handoffs are painful. We often work on tight contractually driven timelines. Squeezing vacation in around drop-dead dates is more stressful to me than working through, particularly when work travel and personal travel would just blur together. I do get comp time for time over 45 hours/week, but usually take it as shorter days here and there.
Unfortunately, it's the U.S., and the only things really keeping me in this job are relatively decent health insurance benefits and the difficulty of finding another comparable position at age 50+. I've thought about kicking off business as an independent consultant. However, the Midwestern U.S. isn't an ideal geographic location for the customers who'd be interested in my services, and I'm not interested in relocating.
I'm in the UK and I get 28 days of annual leave that I can take whenever I want and 10 bank holiday days that are fixed. The minimum legal amount for a full-time worker in the UK is 20 days annual leave plus the 10 bank holidays. If you work part time then both legal minimums are reduced pro-rata.
I also get up to 10 sick days at full pay whereas in the UK there's essentially no legally required sick pay (technically you can get a tiny amount of money from the state after first 3 consecutive days unpaid but it's so tiny that nobody could actually miss work). My experience is that large and some SMEs offer paid sick days but most smaller companies do not.
Key: I work remotely and we can flex time, so for example errands and appointments dont actually need to take time off. Canada.
As a result of remote + flex, I feel like my 3 weeks salaried vacation is plenty. Plus 11 statutory holidays, company usually (ie not in writing) add two more between Christmas/new years, 2 bereavement days, 2 flex days, 5 sick days.
US. Small, private, mid-atlantic company
Personally I'm good with the amount of PTO I get. My company is also full remtote, so that helps as well. AFAIK no one ever has an issue with time off being approved. As long as you put in your request early enough for the length of PTO.
Canadian railway worker so federally regulated. We get something slightly better than the Canada Labour Code (CLC) sets out. Up until recently we had 12 unpaid Personal Leave Days we could take in a year and no paid sick days. Because my job is totally on call, no regular scheduled days off, and trips take 24-45 hours... there of course is the issue of booking a PLD and getting called for work just before it starts, so the company agreed in a letter that they would allow us to book off in advance so that we could guarantee we'd be off on the day we had scheduled. We call it "pre-leave".
The CLC was updated to mandate 5 paid personal days in a year (to cover certain specified things) and 5 paid sick days. After this change EVENTUALLY we got a new agreement that gave us 10 PAID PLDs and 10 paid sick days and we get any unused days paid out at the end of the year at 125%. Only a few months after that new agreement took effect the company notified us that they were scrapping the pre-leave agreement and instead using "a strict interpretation of the collective agreement". That was a year and a half ago and we're currently waiting for it to wind its way through the arbitration process.
So we went from 12 unpaid days to 10 paid days but you need to take 2 of them now to guarantee a specific day off. This is the constant battle with this company, they're willing to throw money at us, but they see time off (especially scheduled) as a problem.
I like the idea of paid time off, but they have made it almost useless by us not knowing if we'll be home for it.
I work at a place that has unlimited PTO that also encourages us to take at least one day every month off and has a good work life balance. I agree that Unlimited PTO can be abused by the company but luckily for me I've never had any issues taking at least a week off every quarter.
I think the bigger thing I enjoy about my company's days off schedule is that we have a known week long break during the week of July 4th and another week on the last week of the year. Those two I think are more important as a software developer, since everyone's taking off, we're not beholden to stakeholders and can truly take off without being worried about being contacted by product or QA or something.
Technically, I have 0 PTO, practically, I get 20 days of PTO like everyone else in the company. Due to being an international contractor, we're not able to be paid for days we don't work, so my company includes additional pay on top of the amount we agreed on so that if I were to work 20 fewer days during the year I would still receive the that agreed upon amount.
I'm still new in my role, but the company is very flexible, and I won't need to worry about taking a half day if something comes up or have someone trying to micromanage my time for me running my kids to school or what have you. The only downside is that I have to mentally remind myself about the fact that I'm still in a way being compensated for taking time off because there's the feeling of "if I don't work I don't get paid". We also require 24/7/365 coverage, so if everyone requested time off for one day we would do a random draw to cover decide who would cover the shift.
So far, the only time I've run into a scheduling conflict once and drew the short straw which was during last Christmas, but I was able to take almost the entire week for Chinese New Year no problem.
I get a fair amount by US standards but want more. Life shouldn’t be all about going to work. Would be especially nice if we banked extra hours after oncall since those are so impactful to my off-hours life. I’m salary/exempt so I get paid the same whether I go oncall every 6 weeks or every 16 weeks, some consideration for short rotations would be appreciated.
Currently get 24 days of PTO/yr inclusive of sick leave (some managers are ok with not recording sick time at all, others are very strict). We also have 7 fixed holidays (Christmas, new years, etc). Time off has a “vacation” bucket and a “PTO” bucket but they’re treated effectively the same for me. Officially, “vacation” requests must be planned in advance and are subject to approval while “pto” can be used for things like sick leave and is auto-approved but this is probably more relevant for scheduled positions.
In about 5 years I’ll get another 5 days/yr of vacation.
Overall appreciate the flexibility of this scheme though a lot of that is due to having supportive management.
My main gripe with the scheme is that sick time is metered and is effectively vacation time, encouraging people to show up to work sick. Ideally this would just be unmetered time off.