A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that US workers get an average of 10 days per year of paid vacation time, far less than the legal minimum required in almost all comparable world economies. And about 33 million workers – 23 percent of the civilian workforce – get no paid vacation at all.
The newest No-Vacation Nation report updates previous CEPR research (going back to 2007) that compared the availability of paid time off for US workers and their international counterparts.
Twenty-five of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) require employers to provide at least 20 paid vacation days per year. Five other countries set the minimum higher, while five others are somewhat lower. The legal minimum in the United States is zero.
The latest No-Vacation Nation report, written by CEPR Senior Research Fellow John Schmitt, calculates that employers, on average, provide only 10 days of paid vacation per year. However, that average masks considerable differences among workers. For instance, more than half (57 percent) of the lowest-paid 10 percent of workers have no paid vacation, and the same is true for 43 percent of those in the bottom quarter. Part-time workers and workers in small firms are also far less likely than full-time workers or workers in larger firms to have employer-provided paid vacation.
“Every other comparable country in the world guarantees workers a decent minimum amount of paid vacation. In the United States, we don’t require employers to give any,” said CEPR Senior Research Fellow John Schmitt. “As a result, almost a quarter of our workforce has nothing at all, and the average for those workers who do have paid vacation is near the bottom of the minimum required by law in the rest of the world’s rich countries.”