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American Workers Are Letting a Third of Their Vacation Time Go to Waste: Report
By Adam Hardy MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
We get far less PTO compared to other countries, and we don’t even use the few vacation days we’re entitled to.
American workers are notoriously deprived of paid time off (PTO). New data suggests that even when they’re given time off, they don’t take full advantage of the perk.
In 2023, 62% of workers with PTO did not use all of their vacation time, letting a third of it go to waste, according to a survey released Wednesday by Sorbet, a fintech lending firm. Of them, 5.5% didn’t take any time off last year.
The share of Americans with unused PTO is “climbing at an alarming rate,” the Sorbet report stated, nearly doubling since 2019. The company found that the average cash value of all that unused PTO comes out to nearly $3,000 per worker.
PTO in the USA
According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. is the only member country to not federally guarantee any paid time off to workers.
By comparison, workers in OECD or European Union nations typically get at least 20 days of paid time off annually, the organization said. Paired with observed public holidays, that number is realistically over 30 in most cases.
As a company perk, most full-time employees in the U.S. do get some paid time off. Sorbet’s survey found that the average PTO policy last year was 15 days off — but workers typically used only 10 of them.
Sorbet’s findings largely mirror a report released in June from the travel site Expedia.
Dubbed the “Vacation Deprivation Report,” Expedia’s 24th installment of the annual survey awarded America the tongue-in-cheek “gold medal for taking fewest vacation days in the world.”
Here’s how the U.S. stacked up against other areas around the globe included in Expedia’s report:
- France: average of 31 days of paid vacation time
- Germany: 29 days off
- UK: 27 days off
- Hong Kong: 26 days off
- Australia: 21 days off
- New Zealand: 21 days off
- Singapore: 20 days off
- Canada: 19 days off
- Japan: 19 days off
- Mexico: 16 days off
- U.S.: 12 days off
In the report, Melanie Fish, head of public relations at Expedia, explained that Americans may not be able to control the amount of paid time off they get, but they should break the “horrible habit” of not using all of the vacation time they do get.
“Clearly,” she said, “there’s a lot for the U.S. to borrow from [other countries].”
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Adam Hardy is Money's lead data journalist. He writes news and feature stories aimed at helping everyday people manage their finances. He joined Money full-time in 2021 but has covered personal finance and economic topics since 2018. Previously, he worked for Forbes Advisor, The Penny Hoarder and Creative Loafing. In addition to those outlets, Adam’s work has been featured in a variety of local, national and international publications, including the Asia Times, Business Insider, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Yahoo! Finance, Nasdaq and several others. Adam graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida, where he studied magazine journalism and sociology. As a first-generation college graduate from a low-income, single-parent household, Adam understands firsthand the financial barriers that plague low-income Americans. His reporting aims to illuminate these issues. Since joining Money, Adam has already written over 300 articles, including a cover story on financial surveillance, a profile of Director Rohit Chopra of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an investigation into flexible spending accounts, which found that workers forfeit billions of dollars annually through the workplace plans. He has also led data analysis on some of Money’s marquee rankings, including Best Places to Live, Best Places to Travel and Best Hospitals. He regularly contributes data reporting for Best Colleges, Best Banks and other lists as well. Adam also holds a multimedia storytelling certificate from Poynter’s News University and a data journalism certificate from the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) at the University of Missouri. In 2017, he received an English teaching certification from the University of Cambridge, which he utilized during his time in Seoul, South Korea. There, he taught students of all ages, from 5 to 65, and worked with North Korean refugees who were resettling in the area. Now, Adam lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with his pup Bambi. He is a card-carrying shuffleboard club member.