Almost a quarter of American employees haven’t taken a single vacation day in the past year, survey finds
But just how many hours are Americans working?
With summer now well and truly over for most, some of us might be starting to feel like it’s been ages since we were on vacation.
For a considerable share of Americans, though, it really has been a while.
The grind bind
A new survey from FlexJobs asked over 3,000 US workers about their paid time off, and found that, while most employees (82%) are offered vacation leave — a luxury not guaranteed in the only advanced economy without a minimum PTO mandate — almost a quarter (23%) said they hadn’t taken a single vacation day over the past year.
According to the study, a major concern for employees was falling behind on their workload — with 43% saying they simply had too much to do. But is America really on the grind much more than other countries?
Zooming out to a global scale, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that US employees do work relatively hard compared with other member nations of the economic group, notching 1,796 hours worked per person last year — about 59 hours longer than average calculated across 36 OECD members. However, no country racked up as many hours worked as America’s southern neighbor, Mexico.
Though the US was one of only 10 nations that worked more than the OECD average, Mexico and Costa Rica racked up over 2,000 hours worked per person in 2024, equating to roughly 42 additional days of work per year above the mean, assuming a 10-hour workday.
At the other end of the spectrum were the usual suspects in these global labor force studies: workers in Germany did ~405 hours less work than the OECD average, closely followed by Scandi nations Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
So, why do Americans refuse to take vacation days? Maybe, as Gallup has mentioned, AI-enhanced work practices are allowing employees to get in a few holiday-mode hours while they’re still on the clock. But the larger factor is probably just good old-fashioned “vacation guilt.”
