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.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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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.
I'm my state they are treated as earned income, so if you leave or they expire they automatically pay it out.
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.
I know!
The previous manager was best mates with him and let it slide hard.
Here, the money for things like that needs to be put aside to cover it so that if the company does go bust they aren't in the lurch.
In the end it worked out ok for all.
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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.
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Sweden has a mixed system. Generally you are required to use 20 of your legally mandated minimum of 25 vacation days, and you may save the rest. The days can then be saved for 5 years, after which they must be used or paid out.
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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.
I feel sorry for Americans
Your thoughts and prayers are all we need
But we also accepts Likes and Subscribes.
Edit: Just don't ring the bell. We've already lost two of them...
Well I mean it's not like the government is going to give us anything actually useful.
Americans do, too. Well, the smart ones feel sorry.
Will you adopt me? I just need a small spot on the floor to sleep, I'm already house trained.
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.
The really cool thing is that my nationally operating employer has offices in NY and CA, and my team has members in both NY and CA. And we in NY don't get paid out minimum unused vacation, while the people on my team in CA, who I work with every day, and who do the same job, in the same company, in the same country, do get paid out.
Our CEO (who recently was let go with a golden parachute and will never have to work again) was asked about this policy at an all-hands, and he replied, "We comply with local laws."
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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."
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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.
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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.
Yeah, also in France; where I work you can stick like a week into like an account and use them another year, so you don't lose them. Fun fact, since Christmas, you can no longer unstick them...
But all that is on top of the legal holidays etc.
Ugh, "floating holidays"
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.
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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.
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Why would you make fun of people for not knowing things?
There was a time when you didn't know either.
Anon was probably told when he started his job.
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.
Sure, but of those 50,000 words, a tiny subset has to do with PTO or leave (and I'd bet that that section of the contract is specifically mentioned in the table of contents). Homie decided that he wanted to do something special with their leave time. Something out of the ordinary. Then, they chose to not ask their HR department, their supervisor, their co-workers, or consult their presumably readily available company policy archive to research for themselves whether their plan was viable.
I understand not wanting to victim blame, but, as presented in this story, this individual is a victim of their own negligence, and that is something that we can hold folks accountable for.
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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.
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In Russia(and most of other ex-republics) they do stack.
Get labour law.
Most civilized nations.
Even if anon didn’t get to bank the days to take them all later I hope their contract gave a payout for the value of the days not taken at the end of the year. If not, they got screwed twice. Take your vacation days.
Know your contract!
Thank you to our receptionist for telling me I was nearing the cap. Used it all on a few months of 4 day work weeks.
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Just read your contract, no? Mine is clear on how many days you can carry over.
Yeah, I always obsessively double check the employee handbook before making a decision like this especially over 4 years.
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I did this with sick leave anticipating in preparation for having a baby. Then they went to unlimited PTO. Didn't pay me out for the days I had saved.
unlimited PTO
Just take time off permanently. You'll still get paid, right?
I do a lot of that quiet work you read about.
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