Do workers with unlimited PTO really take more time off?

For a while, unlimited paid time off was one of the hottest employer benefits on the market. Rather than provide workers with a fixed amount of PTO days, employers offering unlimited PTO typically grant employees an open-ended amount of vacation, to be requested and approved at a manager’s discretion.

The scheme was ranked as the most popular emerging benefit in a 2019 survey of employers and workers by MetLife, with 72% of respondents reporting that unlimited PTO interested employees the most.

Research on the benefit, though, suggests “unlimited” is a misnomer. Even when HR departments offer employees as much vacation time as they want, workers still take about as much — or even less — time off than counterparts with limited PTO plans, data suggests.

Across the board, US workers still struggle to take enough vacation time, no matter whether their employers offer traditional or unlimited PTO.

Unlimited versus traditional PTO. Despite the hype, unlimited PTO remains fairly rare in US workplaces — just 6% of employers surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management offered it in 2022.

There’s very little evidence that the relatively small share of workers who receive unlimited PTO take much more time off than employees on traditional plans. A 2018 study by HR software company Namely found workers with unlimited PTO only took 13 days off on average each year, whereas those with traditional PTO took 15 days annually. When Namely surveyed its clients again in 2022, it found that employees with unlimited plans took 12.09 days off per year, compared to 11.36 days for those with limited PTO. A recent survey by travel company Expedia found workers with unlimited PTO took an additional 3.5 days off in 2022 compared to the national US average.

Still, the Namely data shows employees are taking less time off overall than they were prior to the pandemic, the company’s chief people officer, Amy Roy, noted in a statement.

“Clearly, unlimited PTO has gained credibility as an employee benefit, but to what end?” she said. “Regardless of their company’s plan, workers seem to be taking less time off.”

Why unlimited PTO may be overhyped. Companies tend to extend unlimited PTO to highly paid knowledge workers with demanding jobs that require them to work a large number of hours, said Alec Levenson, a senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the USC Marshall School of Business.

“The next question to ask is how many of those people actually are using up all of their paid time off,” even if they’re on a more traditional limited PTO plan, Levenson said. “And a lot of times, the answer is not all of it.”

As companies put pressure on workers to be more productive, they may find it hard to take one to two days off, let alone weeks, he continued. If employers start offering their employees unlimited PTO, they’re “not really addressing the things that are making them potentially unhappy with a job.”

When workers do take time off, it’s hard for them to disconnect, a recent survey by Ceridian, a human capital software management company, and Harris Poll, found. Forty-seven percent of respondents reported disconnecting from work completely while they’re away, according to the survey of more than 2,000 workers in the US, UK, and Canada. A majority (87%) said they were experiencing burnout.

To ensure employees take adequate time off, regardless of whether their PTO is unlimited or not, “HR leaders and managers should aim to create a culture that normalizes vacation, including flexible policies and executive buy-in,” Ceridian’s VP of people, Michelle Bonam, told HR Brew via email. She recommended using technology to monitor and track vacation utilization.

“Setting expectations and saying to people, ‘We really want you to take the time off because, you know, it’s gonna be good for you and good for us in the long run,’” is something employers can do to ensure their staff disengage, Levenson said.