As summer-getaway season draws to a close, it’s time to face a tough reality: America is not a great vacation nation.
In fact, one report goes so far as to call the United States a “no-vacation nation,” thanks to the paltry (well, nonexistent) amount of paid vacation time mandated by federal law compared with other well-off countries.
According to the study from Center for Economic and Policy Research, the European Union requires member countries to grant workers at least 20 working days of paid vacation. But many nations go well above that number, and some offer a heap of paid holidays to boot. France, for example, requires at least 30 paid workdays off, not including paid holidays, while the United Kingdom mandates 28, followed by Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain and Sweden at 25.
The United States, on the other hand — on the very worst hand — mandates no paid vacation or paid holidays. Zero days. It’s the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 36 of the world’s wealthiest nations, that doesn’t require employers to give workers annual paid leave, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That leaves 23 percent of Americans with no paid vacation and 22 percent without paid holidays.
“I see that as part of a whole set of benefits that people have in other countries but they generally don’t have here,” says Dean Baker, a senior economist at the policy group, which published the No-Vacation Nation report in May.
That’s not to say employers don’t offer vacation. According to the report, employers are granting paid vacation to 90 percent of full-time workers this year and 40 percent of part-time workers. But what might be shocking: Even when Americans get paid time off, they don’t use it all. And when they do use their days — it may not come as a surprise to learn — many of them fail to leave work fully behind.
Vacation might not even be an option for many in the United States, whether they can’t afford to lose wages or have to prioritize other spending ahead of leisure. The top barrier to taking a vacation is cost, says David Huether, senior vice president of research for the U.S. Travel Association.
Still, there might be some positive movement. According to the association, Americans used an average of 17.4 days of paid time off last year, up slightly from 17.2 percent in 2017. That’s based on a survey of more than 1,000 adult workers who work more than 35 hours a week and get paid time off from their jobs.
“Americans over the past few years are taking more time off to vacation, which is a positive trend over the past four to five years, which is the good news,” Huether says. “But the bad news is we still have a ways to go to get back to our long-term average. We’re still underperforming in terms of taking vacations compared to where we used to be.” Between 1978 and 2000, Americans on average took more than 20 days of vacation time, he said.
