How does PTO work at your job?

[Drake3287]

Although now retired, where I worked we only had vacation and sick time. Vacation time could only accrue up to a maximum of 1 1/2 times your yearly rate, like most people I never had an issue with not using my vacation time. As for sick time, we had an open-ended accrual rate, no limits on what you could roll over each year and when you retired they would pay you for 50% of what ever you have on the books. For me, I treated sick time like an insurance policy almost never called in sick for 30 years so when I retired I had something like 3,000 hours which I ended up selling back 50% of.

That 50% sell back was something like $30,000+ so I rolled it into my 457k plan as a one time catchup so I wouldn't be hit with taxes. To this day I never understood why so many of the younger guys wasted their sick time instead of planning for the future. Generational issue I guess.

[mo0n]

We have all sorts of categories for time off. Some expire in a year after you accrue them, others keep banking over the course of your career:

Sick Leave - I accrue 8 hours a month. Sick Leave never expires, and I can use the hours towards retirement (i.e., if I have a year worth of sick leave on the books, and 20 years working for my employer, I can retire and I'll have 21 years on the books, bumping up my retirement ever so slightly).

Annual Leave - At the moment I accrue 10 hours a month, but that goes up the longer I'm employed. Annual Leave never expires, but at the fiscal year, a set amount rolls over into sick leave. At retirement, if I have any on the books, I'll have a check cut to me for the amount.

Holiday Time - Holidays can either be observed or worked. If I work on a holiday, I'll earn the hours as holiday time, and it's good for a year.

Special Leave - Time that we earn for special 'events'. It's good for a year.

I try to leave the sick and annual leave alone and use the various comp time I earn for time off. I could probably write a dissertation on all our leave categories, but I just wanted to keep it simple. Taking time off is not too difficult, and I've never let comp time expire.

[jenn_jenn]

We have “unlimited” PTO - which of course isn’t unlimited but gives you flexibility to work with your manager to take time off that works for you and the company. The catch is that there’s no accrual, so it’s up to you to make sure you actually take time off. We also have 11 holidays and 2 weeks of sick time.

To make it “worth it” compared to our old policy, you should take at least three weeks of vacation/sick combined.

The jury is still out on if I like this set up or not. It was an easy decision though if I should take today off though since there was nothing lost by doing so.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

We have “unlimited” PTO - which of course isn’t unlimited but gives you flexibility to work with your manager to take time off that works for you and the company. The catch is that there’s no accrual, so it’s up to you to make sure you actually take time off. We also have 11 holidays and 2 weeks of sick time.

To make it “worth it” compared to our old policy, you should take at least three weeks of vacation/sick combined.

The jury is still out on if I like this set up or not. It was an easy decision though if I should take today off though since there was nothing lost by doing so.

I have found from friends (never had it personally) they use less time off when it's unlimited. You feel peer pressure to keep working and everyone is worried by taking say 4 weeks off it seems too noticeable. But if you were say given 4 weeks you take it and everyone "understands" versus it's unlimited and everyone they said is "judging you"

[breathemusic]

ooooo, I would love it if I could sell back unused leave. I work for the federal government, so right now I accumulate 6 hours of annual leave and 4 hours of sick leave every 2 weeks (I think at 15 years in that will increase to 8 hours of annual leave per pay period). I can roll over up to 240 hours of annual leave and sick leave never expires (I currently have 518 hours banked). Like someone else noted, sick leave can be banked and count toward retirement. In addition to that, I work 9 hour days so instead of the normal 8 hours M-F I get an extra day off every 2 weeks, plus all the federal holidays. They just started offering the option of 4 days a week 10 hour days but I don't intend to take that. With all those options, I tend to not need a ton of vacation time because I already have many 3 day weekends, several 4 day weekends around holidays, so it's easy to take vacations around then without burning much leave. I built up the full 240 hours of roll-over leave years ago, so now every hour I earn in the year will be use or lose, so damned if I don't just find ways to take it. I'm at the point now where I just try to take 2 big vacations a year instead of 1. Or take an extra day here and there when I just want a break, or want a day to toil in the flower beds, etc.

We also have a policy to earn "credit hours" if you work more than 80 hours in 2 weeks. Those extra hours aren't overtime because we're salaried, so you bank them as "credit hours" that can be redeemed like leave in a later pay period. The catch being that you can only bank up to 24 credit hours. So anything over that and you just lose it at the end of your pay period. So I tend to build and lose those pretty frequently just because there are plenty of times where I work an extra half hour or hour here or there getting to a good stopping point at work.

We do have a leave donor policy where if someone applies, they can qualify for the program and people with extra leave can fill out a form and get their leave donated to a co-worker. This is nice for people that end up with a health issue, have kids, etc and just don't have enough sick or annual leave saved up.

[kork13]

We do have a leave donor policy where if someone applies, they can qualify for the program and people with extra leave can fill out a form and get their leave donated to a co-worker. This is nice for people that end up with a health issue, have kids, etc and just don't have enough sick or annual leave saved up.

That policy kept my family stable when my mother & brother & sister all got diagnosed with various cancers (all within 1-2 years) when I was a kid. My parents were both federal employees, and each of them ended up receiving weeks/months worth of donated leave over the course of a few years while traveling to Hawaii & Houston (from Guam) for cancer treatments while taking care of the rest of us kids (5 kids in all).

[safari]

At my company everyone gets the following:

11 holidays
3 flex days
Paid time off between Christmas and New Year every year (doesn't count toward your own accrued vacation)

Vacation days and sick days accrue based on how long you've been with the company. In my case I get:

15 sick days (granted on Jan 1 each year, don't accrue and can't be carried over)
20 vacation days (accrue monthly, can be carried over, but accrual stops after I accumulate 40 vacation days)

My department also lets everyone leave 4 hours early before every holiday. Also during the summer months we have summer hours, which lets us choose between leaving 2 hours early every Friday or 4 hours early every other Friday.

[terri77]

We can carry over 30 days of annual leave. Sick leave has no limit. I currently earn 20 days of annual leave. In a few years I will earn 26 days of annual leave. Sick leave is always 13 days per year.