In Germany, vacation days expire as well (past a certain amount), but the employer is forced by law to force you to take your vacation days.
Same in norway. You can also transfer some over to a new year. Or be paied out days. But you can not loose them.
I think the rule that we have is that we can transfer the days as long as we have attempted to take them. If we’ve tried to take them and the time has been denied, then they get transferred to the following year, but if we’ve just not taken them I’m just letting them sit there, then we either have to take them quickly at the end of the year or get paid the days.
the employer is forced by law to force you to take your vacation days.
Only the minimum required by law though. For example, 30 vacation days are pretty standard in Germany but the required minimum for a 5 day work week are 20 days.
The employee must take those days off whether they want to or not. In extreme cases this could get them fired even.
In Australia they accrue, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s good in the sense that you can do like the OP and save up for like a 3 month vacation, on the other hand, you’ll end up overworking yourself before you get there.
However, some (all?) states give the employer the right to force you to use them if you build up too many days.
Source: had to deal with a guy on a team I inherited that had built up a bank of 63 weeks (annual plus long service). He did not want to be forced to take them. He politely reminded him that by law they can, so we worked out a payment plan where he took 3 months off a year to catch up. He will celebrate 40 years at the company in a few months.
63 weeks!!! That’s wild!
Not to be a Debbie Downer about it, but I’d honestly be bricking it that the company goes bust in the interim, and that accruement would be for fuck all.
Same in the UK. I ended up taking basically all of November off because I had hardly any holidays last year. It wasn’t intentional at all it just ended up like that.
It’s not really worth it because who wants to be off in November, it’s cold and there’s nothing to do.
In Russia they don’t, but you have to take at least 14 days off(minimal vacation length) each 2 years. 1 year of work gives you 28 days of vacation. Vacation days never expire. So each 2 years you can accumulate 42 days(6 weeks) of vacation.
EDIT: After more in-depth reading, I’m not so sure if you can get more than 56 days of vacation or get thrown into vacation.
Well they got paid out for them right? Right?
In the US, some employers do pay out vacation, but many don’t, because there’s no law requiring them to do so. It’s perfectly legal to offer literally zero vacation days.
California is actually one of the states that require pay out of unused PTO. I believe MA, CO, and LA do as well, Im not sure of all of them. More than half don’t require it, in those states it’s company dependant.
Aside from this, at least in my state, if you opt to cash out your vacation days without taking them, they get taxed at a higher rate. I used to tell my teams, “If you take your vacation days instead cashing them out, you get more money after taxes and you don’t have to be here, so please just take your vacation time.”
I’m pretty sure they just get withheld at a higher rate.
It’s the same amount of money, and the tax rate is calculated on total income (with a bunch of bullshit to make it more complicated for minimal reasons), but getting paid for unused vacation days means that you got a much higher total amount of cash that week, and so bonus checks have more money taken out for taxes because projecting that week’s checks out to a year at $2000 instead of $1500 would put you in a different tax bracket.
But at the end of the year it’s just your total income used to calculate the actual amount owed, so your number would be the same. (Ignoring that it’s progressive and you earned 40 more hours worth of money). So most of the time that difference in withholding is basically just a bigger refund or less owed.
Yup, I’ve never had an employer that pays out vacation. My dad did, and he also had a pension, so I know unicorns at least exist.
Mine just rolls over up to 5 days, and that’s it. No payout or anything, though I think if you get laid off, it needs to be part of the severance package (but if you quit, you get nothing).
It depends. Usually if you leave a job and have any unused vacation left over, they have to pay you for that time. There’s a catch though, they do not have to let you carry over your vacation from year to year (use it or lose it), and/ or they can set a cap of how much vacation you can have accrued. In the latter, you can either lose any vacation over that cap, or some employers might be “kind” and let you convert excess vacation into sick time. Sick time does not have to be paid out when you quit.
My employer, for example, allows us to accrue up to 240 hours of vacation time; anything above 240 gets converted to sick time. We can accrue as much sick time as we want. So long as we remain employed, it never expires. We can also apply our sick time toward our retirement.
At my company, it’s not unheard of for employees to stick around for 20+ years before retiring. If you bank all of your sick time, you can apply toward your retirement date and retire up to three years early. And, a lot of people when they retire will have enough vacation available that they can take a month off before officially retiring; and the company does not stop them.
Also it should be noted, I work in the public sector and am considered a state employee. So that helps.
above 240 gets converted to sick time.
Why would anyone want to get sick? It it is another american thing?
Sick time can be used when you’re sick, have a doctor’s appointment, or need to take care of family members who are sick or have doctor’s appointments. It is time given to the employee so that they do not have to burn up their vacation time.
Granted, if you run out of sick time, you either have to use vacation, or you take unpaid time off. My state has a sharing system, where other employees can give you some of their sick time. This is usually for extreme circumstances, such as on-going long-term care (e.g., chemotherapy) and the person is out of both sick and vacation time.
I’m sure it sounds weird and possibly convoluted. It probably is weird and convoluted. Employers here don’t trust their employees, so they feel the need to treat us like children. Some employers even require employees to get doctors notes excusing their absence or tardiness.
I’m sure there are some people who would take advantage of any kind of unlimited/untracked sick time. I’m not naive to think everybody would work in the honor system. I think that employers here take it to the extreme, and decided that treating everybody this way was easier than working with those who abuse the system. Might be because we are a litigious society in America; a lot of people looking for any excuse to take someone to court for money.
Anyway, I’ll answer any other questions you have.
I can only speak for the UK, but it’s rarely an entitlement to have annual holidays paid, rather an option.
My currently employer will pay out if you’ve demonstrated that you’ve tried to take leave through the year and it’s been declined for whatever reason - they’ll pay the remaining balance. It’s done that way to discourage people from hoarding their days off to try and get a monster payday at the end of it, rather than work themselves into a breakdown from not having any time off work which I can see the benefit of but still not entirely sure it should be at the discretion of the employer.
That, and taking the holiday days is effectively tax free. If you take a week off on a 40hr per week contract, then you get 40hrs worth of time off. If you get it paid, then you’ll get at least 19pc of the leave pay going as tax, depending on where in the UK you are.
I’ve seen previous employers going with the flow and allowing employees to take their leave as paid if they want to, but effectively buying the leave pack at two-thirds rate for payment.
An old place I used to work for went halfway, allowing the carrying of ten days leave into the next year, but anything above that is forfeit.
As always, the devil is in the detail.
I’m in Canada. For regular employment there are a minimum of 3 paid weeks holidays. Vacation pay comes out of every paycheck so it’s an entitlement. There is vacation hoarding, but mostly to take a while summer off or something. Nobody wants to get paid out for accumulated vaycay because the tax hit is monstrous.
Know your employer’s rules for any PTO you earn so that you can use that meager amount to the absolute maximum. Limits, payouts, and policies. Otherwise, you risk leaving money on the table.
My wife had a nice mail about her 18 unused vacation days this year and what she wants to do with them. The employers keep trying to make it as confusing as possible with two types of days and counters and whatnot, but French law protects us from the worst of it.
Worst case scenario : she gets paid 18 days of work.
Floating holidays are the shit in my workplace, because like other holidays (and unlike vacation), they count as time worked for overtime calculations.
I work in municipal government, so frequently have to go to after-hours meetings for things like City Council, Planning and Zoning, Board of Adjustment, Open Houses, etc. The way things work normally is that if I take time off, it keeps me from being able to accrue OT that week.
For instance, if I take Monday off, work the rest of the week, and work 4 hours for a Council meeting on Tuesday and 4 hours for an open house on Wednesday, it would be calculated as 40 hours worked and I just wouldn’t use any of my vacation time.
But for holidays and floating holidays it counts as time worked for purposes of OT, so with the same working scenario I’d have get the 1.5x OT bump for the night meetings instead of a 1x vacation time credit. That’s 4 more hours of pay I earn for the same amount of time worked.
What a dumbass
Finding out if vacation days carry over or are use it or lose it is something you should inquire about on day 1 at the latest.
In Canada, it’s illegal to not have vacation days or have your vacation time paid out. I’ve never heard of it happening here because it’s so easy to prove or disprove that only idiots would do it. Don’t worry, many employers will screw you over in ways that are harder to track.
So what do they do with your accrued vacation time when your employment ends? That’s what pay out vacation means.
Why would you make fun of people for not knowing things?
There was a time when you didn’t know either.
Yeah, told in a 50,000 word contract that would take 6 lawyers to figure out.
Meanwhile the average person is just looking for a fucking job and doesn’t have the time to worry about what the contract says.
Assuming it’s a true story.
That said, the vacation expiration rules haven’t always been around. They started showing up back in the 90s/00s, as accounting firms started counting these days as liabilities and businesses started trying to minimize how many days were outstanding on their books.
I did know a few public school teachers who did exactly this. They’d save up vacation for five years and then take a paid semester off.
Can’t do it anymore, but it wasn’t always this way.
Yup, it was a shift because unlimited vacation was from the boomer era where employers actually treated employees fairly well. Companies started realizing that all of the boomers who had been with the company for two or three decades all had like two years of vacation time saved up. And when that gets counted as a liability (because the employee can just fuck off and disappear for an extended period, while you keep paying them,) it was a big incentive for companies to begin limiting vacation.
Lots of the boomers were grandfathered in so they got to keep their vacation banked, mostly to avoid the “half of our entire staff just walked out of the all-hands meeting and put in for 2 years of vacation time each, because we announced we’d be clawing back any unused time at the end of the month” dilemma. But new hires get fucked with vacation time caps, and big limits on how much they can get paid out if they quit.
the boomer era where employers actually treated employees fairly well
Lol what are you talking about
Got to disagree with you here. Employers will do anything and everything to fuck the common man over. My manager was frequently taking advantage of grade schoolers who were just old enough to work and making up rules, or not telling them about how breaks work, encouraging them not to take their paid breaks etc. This is not on OP IMHO.
If OP has an employment contract and can read, then it’s entirely their fault. This is something that’s easy to check and is written down so that both sides are clear what the terms are. Even if they can’t read they should have asked someone to read it to them.
I have worked two jobs where I haven’t been presented a contract. I’m sure there are contracts that were signed, but when youre a stupid young teen they assume you dont know anything (I didn’t). I currently am unemployed as I’m taking the summer after college Graduation off. I know what to look out for now but when I first started I was clueless.