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Comment by pathy | Hacker News Reader

A Swedish perspective:

By law you are granted 25 days vacation per year, assuming you have worked enough to "earn them", generally you get 12.5-13.x% extra salary per day worked that goes towards your vacation.

The law also says that you have a right to 4 weeks uninterrupted vacation during the June, July and August. At least two months before the (requested) vacation you must get a definitive decision. The employers are not allowed, by law, to change their mind about granted vacation time.

I believe I saw a study that recommended shorter, more frequent, vacations as the best way to recover from mental fatigue but I assume that there is a lot of opposing opinions on that matter.

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That 4 week of uninterrupted vacation is mandatory or a person can take that days in different periods?

In the UK the legal minimum is 28 days. In theory you can take the days however you want. In practice though you usually have to negotiate when to take them with your boss. They have to allow you to take them all off at some point in the year though so they're usually pretty accommodating.

I've always been surprised at how little people get in the US. Given that it's a wealthy nation it seems to lag considerably behind European countries in this regard.

NB: Those 28 "include" bank holidays. It used to be a 20 day mandatory minimum, which was meant to be 20 days + bank holidays, but unscrupulous bosses were including bank holidays in the 20, so some people were only getting 12 days "real" holiday. (Days they could pick).

So now it's a 28 day minimum, of which 8 are usually bank holidays and 20 free to pick.

In Austria it's 25 + bank holidays, and Austria has a large amount of bank holidays so some years it can be around 35 days free. I was pretty shocked when I first started working here how much time was given free. I'm going to have a hard time readjusting when/if I go back to Canada.

People working hourly jobs don't get much guatanteed vacation and we have lots of them. Just about any full-time professional setting will have much more. Somewhere around 20 days when you factor in vacation and holidays and most give more days after a few years of service. The end result is that the older working population has many more days it just isn't mandated by the government. In regards to wealthy nation vacation times: It is possible that prosperity is not derived from vacation.

Also possible that most of the wealth is concentrated into a small enough number of people that the average vacationer is fairly poor.

You have a right to take it during that summer period. You don't have to but your employer are not required to grant you four weeks of uninterrupted vacation during say November.

Many Swedes have summer houses that they go to during the summer when the kids are on summer break from school. There is also a so called "Industrial Vacation" during July, where many companies at least partially close for a month, this is especially true for manufacturing.

It is not mandatory, you can take vacation whenever you want to (as long as it's granted of course).

Another interesting fact about Swedish law is that you are free to leave your job for further education if you want. Max 6 months and when you come back, the employers is required by law that you recieve the same sort of job tasks and the same amount of pay of course.

The employer has the right to decide when you may leave for max 6 months ahead in the future.

> "I believe I saw a study that recommended shorter, more frequent, vacations as the best way to recover from mental fatigue but I assume that there is a lot of opposing opinions on that matter."

As for myself, I find that I don't manage to totally disconnect from all things work until nearly a week of vacation, so even 9 full days (which is what you get when you take an entire week off) is kind of "not enough" because you only really enjoy that for 2 or 3 days.

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