Luxembourg & Finland Offer Their Workers The Most 'Paid Time Off', US & China Not So Much...
This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao, ranks the countries with the highest number of mandatory paid time off in annual business days.
Importantly, this list does not include:
Saturdays and Sundays
National public holidays
Religious holidays
For example, a country can state its leave policy as “30 days off” but if they are calendar days, that results in roughly 22 work days off in a year after removing weekends.
Only countries with 24 or more work days off have made it to this ranking.
Data for this article has been sourced from multiple places, including: such as VacationTracker, BoundlessHQ, Replicon, and RiverMate amongst others. The information presented here is also current to July 2024.
Europe Takes Its Vacation Time Seriously
The top 10 countries with the most paid time off are all found in Europe.
As it happens, all EU member states are required by law to ensure a minimum of 20 days (four weeks) off in their labor codes.
However, several EU member states go above and beyond, adding in extra days off than the mandatory minimum.
These include Luxembourg (26 days), Finland, France, and Sweden, Austria, and Denmark (all 25 days).
Many of these countries prioritize leave in the summer especially, and families leave the city to spend time outdoors.
U.S., China, and Japan’s Paid Time Off Policies
Noticeably missing from this list are several major economies: including the U.S., China, Germany, Japan, India and the UK.
Both Germany and the UK have a listed minimum of 20 work days off (the UK also has eight bank holidays not included in this dataset).
Japan and India both have roughly 10-14 work days off (14-18 calendar days). In Japan, this can go up with every year of work at the company. Both countries—India especially—have several public holidays.
Meanwhile, China has one of the lowest in the world, at five mandatory days off, which doubles after 10 years of work. Again, this does include the two weeks of public holidays at Chinese New Year and the National Day of China.
Finally, the U.S. has no country-wide minimum paid time off policy.
For a list that has the countries with the most time off overall check out Mapped: Which Countries Get the Most Paid Vacation Days? It includes the split between paid work days off and public holidays.