I’m assuming the data for Europe is largely correct, but a lot of the per country data doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Afghanistan (35 days), Libya (45), Yemen (46), etc. what percentage of workers there are getting that many paid days off?
Edit - the original source even had the audacity to label Yemen with a “smiley face” since it has the most paid days for the region.
Could be better for sure, but a graph showing the US as having 0 days of paid days off because the federal government doesn't mandate anything is misleading at best. Average US worker after 1 year of employment earns 7 sick days and 11 vacation days. And likely has some state and federal holidays off as well, and could very well qualify for state required PTO and sick time. But that doesn't get clicks and attention.
Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?
On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.
Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Sick days as other wrote is prescribe by a doctor. It doesn't have a limit (e.g. .y college broke his leg and was on sick leave for 1.5 year). And his vacation time accumulated, he didn't use his 26 days first year so the next he had 52 days to use.
Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.
I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days?
If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.
If we avoid work when we're sick so that we don't get other people sick, wouldn't that result in a healthier population? I guess I'm confused as to why it wouldn't result in that?
Life expectancy in the US is lower because we're all overweight. Infant mortality isn't a standardized metric, so it really shouldn't be used to compare health systems, even though people try to do so all of the time. A lot of infant mortality in the US is due to there being 1.5-2x as many births to mothers under the age of 20 (versus what one might see in Europe), which is really a societal problem, not a healthcare problem.
Except for some drastic cases I've not seen people taking more than 2/3 single days a year.
In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped, so any missed day is a missed paid day. When social security comes into play they tend to pay the base pay of the position.
That would mean that if you miss a week because of an illness you might see a salary reduction close to a fifth of your monthly salary. That's something that most people don't have the luxury.
Apart of that most companies treat any medical leave after the third (yearly) as suspicious, which needs extra investigation.
So as we might not have a limit, and it's relatively paid, most people do meagre use of it.
What countries? Above peoplemwrote about Germany.and didn't mention such strange limit of first few days. Also in Poland there is no such thing. You can have a sick leave for 1 day and you get paid the same amount as if you get 3 weeks - 80% of your salary.
I think an interesting point here is there is no substantial difference between allocated vacation days if you work for the government or a private employer. One would think the government would set a good example.
I've never worked at a job that didn't offer some form of PTO, only exception is when you are doing contract work and not a full time employee, you simply take time off when the rest of the company does for no pay during those windows of time.
US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s, when corporate taxes were much higher, education, housing and healthcare were far cheaper, wealth was more evenly distributed, and government investment in infrastructure and R&D was more about delivery than corporate/academic grift.
The more innovative companies in the US tend to have generous vacation policies.
I think what the article is really about the rest of the country. In Europe, even service industry people get 4-6 weeks off per year. In the US service industry that is unheard of.
I guess it depends on what your personal priorities are. I’d say most Europeans prioritize their families, friends and life _away from work_ over work, but maybe you don’t. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You're assuming that's due to more days off? I have my doubts. I think the US could offer more paid days off, and it would retain its higher wages and lower taxation rates.
The areas with the highest wages are disproportionately more expensive, and the personal risks forced on both workers and the unemployed are far dangerous. (Esp lack of healthcare.)
What do you mean by "lack of healthcare" exactly? Are you under the impression that it's hard to get healthcare in the US? Or that the average healthcare experience is extraordinarily expensive?
I guess thinking from first principles probably the ideal is neither government mandating days off nor their behind terribly hard to come by.
Better imo would be - if I personally accomplished something meaningful and valuable and 'earned' time, then I am strongly incentivized to take time. Also it taking time will help my health and wellness meaningfully then I should also be incentivized to do so.
But that seems impossible to setup if we aren't all our own business owning entrepreneurs.
From the first principles, I suspect it’s an attitude thing, management-to-individual-contributors relationships. If management treats ICs as equals and tries to form a healthy human-centric culture, you get unlimited PTO. If the management treats ICs as tools to do the work and tries to squeeze maximum performance per dollar out of that biomass, you get sweatshops with zero time off. Incidentally things correlate with ICs replaceability - the more replaceable an individual is, the less reasons to care (see a work-performer as a human with needs and problems and ) business owners have. Plus, the wellbeing of the business is a likely factor - the more breathing space it gets, the more it could afford (unless greed and lack of long-term planning kills everything) to be less financially optimal short-term for long-term prosperity.
Regulations are means of pushing the bottom line back at scale. They should be unnecessary in ideal humane society, but that’s not a thing. I wonder whether there’s a way to shift the culture somehow… but there seems to be no political will for that, because it’s certainly not any popular agenda point.
I dont want to derail the conversation about the article but what's with two separate accounts posting within 5 minutes of each other both going off about America inventing transistors?
I wonder how much vacation time the people who invented the transistor took each year.
Edit: up to three mentions of transistors now. Bizarre
The country that does not, invented more or less every modern technology (transistors, ICs, wifi, microwaves, cellular). Mayhaps there is something to it.
This can be spun ad infinitum: You wouldn't have all of these technologies without machines from the Netherlands and mirrors from Germany. So yeah, whatever.
Most of those things were invented by a company granted a government monopoly on communications and not allowed to directly profit off of any of those advances.
AT&T threw money at smart people and said, "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it"
The big one on the list that wasn't AT&T was microwaves and that was a contractor to Nasa [0] in the heat of the moon race and a similar "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it" mandate.
[0] Defense contractor Raytheon most specifically.
I think that's one thing people truly forget when they ask "Why can't we do things like this anymore?"
AT&T paid people to fuck around. Claude Shannon, father of Information Theory, founder of Artificial Intelligence, and namesake to Anthropic's flagship product, was also busy building flame-throwing trumpets and rocket frisbees while creating entire new fields.
I’m assuming the data for Europe is largely correct, but a lot of the per country data doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Afghanistan (35 days), Libya (45), Yemen (46), etc. what percentage of workers there are getting that many paid days off?
Edit - the original source even had the audacity to label Yemen with a “smiley face” since it has the most paid days for the region.
What is going on in the US is nothing short of shameful.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick...
Could be better for sure, but a graph showing the US as having 0 days of paid days off because the federal government doesn't mandate anything is misleading at best. Average US worker after 1 year of employment earns 7 sick days and 11 vacation days. And likely has some state and federal holidays off as well, and could very well qualify for state required PTO and sick time. But that doesn't get clicks and attention.
More data, if one is curious:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t06.htm
> earns 7 sick days
Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?
On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.
I included them to show that, on average, PTO does not need to be used for sick time and to show that the vacation time is vacation time.
> "workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation"
It looks like in Germany it's 20 days a year - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sick-days-absentees-mental-hea...
Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Sick days as other wrote is prescribe by a doctor. It doesn't have a limit (e.g. .y college broke his leg and was on sick leave for 1.5 year). And his vacation time accumulated, he didn't use his 26 days first year so the next he had 52 days to use.
Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.
I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days?
If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.
If we avoid work when we're sick so that we don't get other people sick, wouldn't that result in a healthier population? I guess I'm confused as to why it wouldn't result in that?
Life expectancy in the US is lower because we're all overweight. Infant mortality isn't a standardized metric, so it really shouldn't be used to compare health systems, even though people try to do so all of the time. A lot of infant mortality in the US is due to there being 1.5-2x as many births to mothers under the age of 20 (versus what one might see in Europe), which is really a societal problem, not a healthcare problem.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db371.htm
The sick leave has to go through the healthcare system. That said, there are doctors that would just blindly approve, but it's not exactly a norm.
A lot of those sick days are also childcare.
2-3 weeks is probably an average skewed by burnt out (or seriously sick, cancer) people taking 9 months to get better
Can confirm in non-European country. In Dominican Republic they don't count either
Except for some drastic cases I've not seen people taking more than 2/3 single days a year.
In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped, so any missed day is a missed paid day. When social security comes into play they tend to pay the base pay of the position.
That would mean that if you miss a week because of an illness you might see a salary reduction close to a fifth of your monthly salary. That's something that most people don't have the luxury.
Apart of that most companies treat any medical leave after the third (yearly) as suspicious, which needs extra investigation.
So as we might not have a limit, and it's relatively paid, most people do meagre use of it.
What countries? Above peoplemwrote about Germany.and didn't mention such strange limit of first few days. Also in Poland there is no such thing. You can have a sick leave for 1 day and you get paid the same amount as if you get 3 weeks - 80% of your salary.
I wouldn't take into account sick days, because this article doesn't also.
I was mentioning it because the data does and also to get ahead of people claiming that US PTO includes sick time, when it mostly doesn't.
The point is that it is a limited amount of paid sick days, which is a completely foreign concept in most places (pun intended).
I think an interesting point here is there is no substantial difference between allocated vacation days if you work for the government or a private employer. One would think the government would set a good example.
I've never worked at a job that didn't offer some form of PTO, only exception is when you are doing contract work and not a full time employee, you simply take time off when the rest of the company does for no pay during those windows of time.
Shameful? The country that invented transistors and the internet is getting roasted by people who need 40 days off just to recover from existing.
Work is a privilege.
Assuming you're serious, as a European, I applaud your willingness to hurt yourself so we can have transistors and also have 40 days off each year.
US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s, when corporate taxes were much higher, education, housing and healthcare were far cheaper, wealth was more evenly distributed, and government investment in infrastructure and R&D was more about delivery than corporate/academic grift.
Perhaps there's a reason it has declined since.
> healthcare were far cheaper
In the 60s people would often die from ailments that are now solved with routine outpatient procedures.
Cars were cheaper too but it turns out all that emissions and safety equipment costs money.
100% disagree.
SmartPhones, Cloud, AI.
Just three things that happened in the past 20 years and were brought to the world by US companies.
Also post war Europe had to rebuild, the US didn't - and lots of scientists headed west.
The more innovative companies in the US tend to have generous vacation policies.
I think what the article is really about the rest of the country. In Europe, even service industry people get 4-6 weeks off per year. In the US service industry that is unheard of.
I guess it depends on what your personal priorities are. I’d say most Europeans prioritize their families, friends and life _away from work_ over work, but maybe you don’t. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Countries invent nothing, people do. And I bet those who invented transistors and the internet had plenty of days off.
BTW if work would be a privilege, you would have to pay to do it
The US has generally higher wages than Europe and lower taxation rates. Those paid days off are not free.
You're assuming that's due to more days off? I have my doubts. I think the US could offer more paid days off, and it would retain its higher wages and lower taxation rates.
Switzerland has all that and paid days off on par with the rest of Europe.
You talk as if you believe low taxation rates are good for low earners.
And the US has the lower life expectancy.
> lower taxation rates
eh.. many western countries have comparable taxation rates. That's not true.
Regardless it would be nice to have the choice to work 75% the hours for 75% pay. Not many jobs offer that, though.
Everything in the US is built around maximum value extraction for corporate profits, and I believe this is just another cog in that system.
This comment needs to be pinned.
The areas with the highest wages are disproportionately more expensive, and the personal risks forced on both workers and the unemployed are far dangerous. (Esp lack of healthcare.)
What do you mean by "lack of healthcare" exactly? Are you under the impression that it's hard to get healthcare in the US? Or that the average healthcare experience is extraordinarily expensive?
It's easy if you're employed by a reasonable company.
Healthcare being so tied to your employer is so anti-labor it's unbelievable.
All I wanted from this article was a table with the list of countries and the amounts of paid days off, but the chart labels only 16 countries.
The referenced source includes an image with all of the values: https://www.moorepay.co.uk/app/uploads/2025/07/01_Which-Coun...
Why does it say 0 for the US? You have Thanksgiving, Christmas, 4th of July and more? Are they unpaid days off?
Depends on the company. The US maintains no requirements, federal holidays are a suggestion, not a mandate.
A few states inside the US upgrade federal holidays to state holidays to required paid time off. Most don't.
In the US paid holidays are a corporate "tradition" more than a regulated common good.
Even US federal employee holidays vary between agencies and branches of government.
I think they're technically not federally mandated. Businesses can be open on Christmas at their discretion and require workers to come in.
Holidays are on top of vacations so they shouldn't be counted .
It depends on the job and is not mandated to be paid, or even given off.
Because it gets more attention if they ignore reality and treat a lack of a federal mandate as meaningful information.
The rest of the world seems to believe that if the government doesn't mandate it, it doesn't happen.
well, then what happens when the company decides to revoke your pto? where do you put that into the statistics?
Of course, nobody really gets paid for days off, anywhere, ever. Salaries are prorated, people are paid for the days they actually work.
Of course not, but there is a strong default option effect.
And more often then not an employee _has to_ take the exact amount of vacation that's mandated in their country.
I guess thinking from first principles probably the ideal is neither government mandating days off nor their behind terribly hard to come by.
Better imo would be - if I personally accomplished something meaningful and valuable and 'earned' time, then I am strongly incentivized to take time. Also it taking time will help my health and wellness meaningfully then I should also be incentivized to do so.
But that seems impossible to setup if we aren't all our own business owning entrepreneurs.
From the first principles, I suspect it’s an attitude thing, management-to-individual-contributors relationships. If management treats ICs as equals and tries to form a healthy human-centric culture, you get unlimited PTO. If the management treats ICs as tools to do the work and tries to squeeze maximum performance per dollar out of that biomass, you get sweatshops with zero time off. Incidentally things correlate with ICs replaceability - the more replaceable an individual is, the less reasons to care (see a work-performer as a human with needs and problems and ) business owners have. Plus, the wellbeing of the business is a likely factor - the more breathing space it gets, the more it could afford (unless greed and lack of long-term planning kills everything) to be less financially optimal short-term for long-term prosperity.
Regulations are means of pushing the bottom line back at scale. They should be unnecessary in ideal humane society, but that’s not a thing. I wonder whether there’s a way to shift the culture somehow… but there seems to be no political will for that, because it’s certainly not any popular agenda point.
I dont want to derail the conversation about the article but what's with two separate accounts posting within 5 minutes of each other both going off about America inventing transistors?
I wonder how much vacation time the people who invented the transistor took each year.
Edit: up to three mentions of transistors now. Bizarre
That is surprising, unlike the expected USA bad rhetoric
The country that does not, invented more or less every modern technology (transistors, ICs, wifi, microwaves, cellular). Mayhaps there is something to it.
You didn't invent microwaves. Well, your lot invented the klystron. Know what a klystron is? No? Well there you are.
But I bet you know what the cavity magnetron - invented in Scotland - is. You probably used one today already.
Cellular phones were invented in the UK and Finland. The US didn't even have them until the first couple of generations were obsolete here.
Transistors were invented in Germany, although they were made practical in the US, I'll them that.
also jet engine
discovered penicillin
This can be spun ad infinitum: You wouldn't have all of these technologies without machines from the Netherlands and mirrors from Germany. So yeah, whatever.
Most of those things were invented by a company granted a government monopoly on communications and not allowed to directly profit off of any of those advances.
AT&T threw money at smart people and said, "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it"
No one does that anymore.
The big one on the list that wasn't AT&T was microwaves and that was a contractor to Nasa [0] in the heat of the moon race and a similar "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it" mandate.
[0] Defense contractor Raytheon most specifically.
I think that's one thing people truly forget when they ask "Why can't we do things like this anymore?"
AT&T paid people to fuck around. Claude Shannon, father of Information Theory, founder of Artificial Intelligence, and namesake to Anthropic's flagship product, was also busy building flame-throwing trumpets and rocket frisbees while creating entire new fields.
So why can't I order a rocket frisbee today? Wtf America.