this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Standard is for your workplace to force you to take a vacation if you build up to much. It should be illegal to remove your vacation.
They can also pay it out as wage instead at the end of the year. It's the standard practice around here if you accumulate above a certain threshold. Nothing gets lost, except that you pay taxes on wages but not on vacation.
Telling you to use it or lose it is essentially forcing you.
Yeah but theres a huge difference between being forced to use it (and still getting paid vacation) and losing it(no vacation and no pay).
Maybe unpopular but I'm not of the opinion that a business should babysit a grown adult and monitor their PTO and make them take it.
How do you even imagine it? Can you force someone to take their PTO at any time? Or only when they will absolutely lose it? (End of year)
So a company will lose how many days at the end of each year trying to force their staff to take days off?
As long as the employer has any say in, when the PTO is taken, they have a responsibility Period
In my country you have to inform your employee, when their vacation days are about to expire and make measurable efforts to find a vaccination schedule that works for both of you. Or else they don't expire.
Or you know, you could talk to your employees and work out a schedule over the year, that works for both of you. If you, as a business, are unable to do basic management tasks, then yes you run into the situation, where you are functionally unable to do business at the end of the year.
They have a responsibility to let you know, yes. And they have to actually let you take it. Beyond that should be personal responsibility.
Here are my expectations and how I normally experience pto policy at work.
If a company does the above then the employee has no one to blame if their days are lost.
Not sure where you're from, but it's pretty common here in Australia. I think there are a few things to addresses.
There are two mechanisms a company might make you take leave.
A company shut down period. Eg company is closed over Christmas to new years and requires employees to take a week of leave then.
Over a threshold of leave. Leave won't evaporate at the end of a calendar year, it builds each day and can only be used or paid out. Companies will often have a threshold, for example 8 weeks of leave before they may require you to create a plan to use it, or pay it out. The reason an employer does this is staff leave is a liability on the books. Eg If you make $100k, 8 weeks leave is approprimately a $16k liability for the employer.
8 weeks. Haha man that's like a pipe dream.
I think PTO works kind of the same in most places? My point is you can't really force an employee to take PTO and if they ignore their PTO policy that should be on them.
If a business closes down for Xmas new years, then you're but really taking PTO right? Workplace is closed. If you force PTO to be taken and most of your staff dragged their feet or didn't read their email, then essentially you're unable to operate for the last month of every year
I kinda agree. I think my old company did a reasonable job. We calculated vacation days via accrual, and I think you could have, like, 6 weeks accrued at any given time. At the end of every month, HR would send out emails to everyone who was near their limit and tell them to use it or lose it. This usually resulted in me saying "oh, okay", and then scheduling one or two vacation days per month just randomly.
I was shocked the first time I had vacation days expire without any kind of notification that I had miscalculated, and there was no payout or anything for the lost hours. I mean, the vacation days are part of the negotiated reimbursement for work. The deal is I give my time doing whatever I’m asked, and in return they give me money and time off. They shouldn’t be able to not give it to me because my napkin math was wrong.
To me it is no different than if you were paid by physical check, and if you didn’t pick up your check fast enough they threw it away and didn’t pay you. If I hadn’t already been radicalized, this would have put me over the edge.
I'm assuming that's the US your talking, here I couldn't save up days like anon's super genius plan but they wouldn't all disappear.
The most likely thing to happen would be they would just force me to take the holiday. If I started trying to do that round about this time of year they would be telling me to take a month off somewhere. If I didn't do anything at that point they would just randomly start booking time off for me. There isn't a way for me to stack them exactly.
Try and take holiday and they refuse the time because there isn't capacity then they have to pay you for that time.
But there's no system where they can just vanish your days.
That sounds nice