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Quick Poll: Vacation Days

We only get 12 vacation days per year. It increases to 15 days after 10 years of service, then 20 days after 15 years of service. Is this good, normal, or poor? It doesn't seem like enough, especially to both take a see-new-places trip and do a family visit in the same year.

We do get 12 holidays as days off with pay, mostly clumped at the end of the year for Christmas shutdown. Also, sick days aren't levied against us, so that is fair. Comp-time is an option, but that doesn't really count in my mind as time off (we can get paid for any overtime instead).

So, a quick poll: is your vacation policy better or worse than mine is? Do you feel like you get enough time off? Do you even get to use your vacation time?

Comments

  1. I just started as a teller at a bank. I may not have the details quite right, but here's what (I think) I know:
    * 20 days vacation per year
    * 6 paid holidays
    * not sure about sick days; think it comes out of PTO

    Since I just started, I'm accruing my PTO time. I get 10 hours per month, not counting my first month, since I'm a 30-hour employee. After a year, I'll have 20-days' equivalent in hours off.

    As for the freedom to take it off, only one employee can take PTO on a specific day at a time, and seniority is all that is used to decide conflicts. Also, since scheduling is done a full month at a time, and schedules are not very regular, you have to request pretty far ahead of time.

    I'm not going to venture a guess as to whether that is better than what you have. Up front, it looks like I have the potential for a good amount of time off, but I have no idea whether I'll end up getting all of it or not.

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  2. I don't generally post anything about work to the Internets. But I can tell you in person later. :)

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  3. In manufacturing facilities where I have worked new people got zero to seven days of PTO, increasing to 14 in about the third year. There were a good number of union holidays in that environment but you were required to take PTO during the first week of July for plant shutdown. SO new employees basically had zero time off. In a law office where I wrote the time off database, you gradually accrued 2 and a half weeks during your first year and by five years you had six weeks off. SO I would say you have a generous policy for a manufacturer but a sad one for a law office or bank.

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  4. At my company (a software engineering firm) we start out with one week of vacation time and one week of "personal" time. It amounts to two weeks vacation, but personal time is, in the paperwork, earmarked for sick days and the like. In practice, it's just vacation time that everyone tries to use up first, since it does not rollover year to year.

    Every five years at the company, we get another week of vacation. We also have 12 paid holidays.

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  5. Paul gets 21 days PTO and 4 floating holidays plus 6 company holidays. There is flex time and an option to buy one additional week of PTO (it is deducted from your pay a certain amount per week). He has been there seven years.

    When he started it was two weeks vacation, one week personal, two weeks sick time and twelve company holidays (no flex time, no option to buy)

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  6. I get 15 days vacation, 5 sick and US bank Holidays (10 I think). We also get 4 days of "conference leave" that can be used for conferences of our choosing. That increases at 1 day a year up to 25 I believe. We are also shutdown between Christmas and New Year's which counts as vacation time.

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  7. A little late to the party...but employees where I work get 10 days of vacation after 6 months (none till then) and then that goes up to 15 after two years of service.

    Salaried employees also don't have sick time counted against us; hourly employees have a separate bank of PTO time that builds up to account for that.

    The number of paid holidays we get varies from year to year...sometimes they work in "floating" holidays for things like Christmas Eve if that makes sense on the calendar (like if Christmas is on a Tuesday), and sometimes they don't. Some years we get two floating holidays to do with whatever we want, and some years we don't get any because they get "assigned."

    I agree with you - if you have to combine travel to see family and travel for fun, what I have never feels like enough to me. I have to allocate all the days in a chart to make sure I don't accidentally use up something I'm going to need later (seriously). But I wonder if there's any amount of vacation time that would ever feel like "enough" to me... :)

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