US workers average 10 paid vacation days a year, and 33 million get none

Workers in the United States receive an average of 10 days of paid vacation a year, and roughly 33 million of them, about 23 percent of the civilian workforce, receive none at all, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The report, written by CEPR senior research fellow John Schmitt, updates an analysis the group has published periodically. It compares the United States with other wealthy economies on one measure: what the law requires employers to provide. Twenty-five countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development require at least 20 paid vacation days a year, and five require more. The legal minimum in the United States is zero.

“Every other comparable country in the world guarantees workers a decent minimum amount of paid vacation,” Schmitt said in a statement accompanying the report. “In the United States, we don’t require employers to give any.”

The individual country figures show how wide the gap runs. The United Kingdom sets a minimum of 28 days. Sweden, France, Denmark and Austria set 25. Japan and Canada set 10, the same number of days the average American worker receives without any legal guarantee, Common Dreams reported.

Within the American workforce, the report finds the absence of paid vacation concentrated among the lowest earners. Fifty-seven percent of workers in the bottom 10 percent of earnings have no paid vacation days. Among workers in the bottom quarter of earnings, 43 percent have none. Part-time workers and workers at small firms are less likely to have employer-provided paid vacation than full-time workers and workers at larger firms.

Legislation to change that is pending in Congress. The Protected Time Off Act, introduced by Reps. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island, Nikki Budzinski of Illinois, Greg Casar of Texas and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, with a Senate companion from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, would guarantee full-time employees no less than two weeks of paid annual leave a year, to be used for any reason and at their standard rate of pay. The leave would come in addition to any paid sick leave or family and medical leave already guaranteed by law, and the bill bars employers from discriminating against workers who use it.

The sponsors put the number of private sector workers without access to annual paid vacation leave at nearly 27 million, or more than one in five.

“As an Austin City Council member in 2018, I passed the first rule in the South requiring employers to provide workers with paid sick leave,” Casar said in the announcement. “While that ordinance is still held up in court, Congress can go further by passing the PTO Act and guaranteeing that all workers have access to paid vacation.”

Crockett said in the same announcement that for millions of American workers, including most hourly workers, “a day off to care for a sick child or attend a friend’s wedding means missing a day’s pay.”

Sanders has pursued the same guarantee before. In March 2024, as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he introduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act with Sens. Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler of California, alongside a House companion from Magaziner. That bill would have let all employees accrue at least one hour of paid annual leave for every 25 hours worked. It did not become law.

Paid vacation is also one of ten items in the New Affordability Agenda the Congressional Progressive Caucus announced in April, a package that also covers prescription drug pricing, childcare costs, utility bills, overtime pay and a ban on super PACs. The caucus said polling from Data for Progress found every proposal in the package drew support from nearly 60 percent of Republicans.

Paid vacation is not the only benefit the United States leaves to employers. The country has no national requirement for paid maternity leave and no national requirement for paid sick leave.