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How To Plan Your PTO So You Get Over 40 Days Of Vacation In 2023

If you plan them right, you can give yourself some nice, looong, relaxing vacations spread throughout the year. Here's how.

1 year ago · 56.5k reads ·

On Twitter, we came across this extremely helpful post about how to maximize the use of your paid time off from work to take ample vacations across the year:

Share appropriately. pic.twitter.com/JZLa7XEZrD
— GHOST (@afashola_) October 25, 2022

This idea was so intriguing that we decided to visualize it on a calendar.

A few notes: different countries and workplaces often recognize different holidays, and your specific workplace may give you a different amount of PTO than what's assumed here. But here's just a sketch of what it might look like to organize your PTO for 2023 (and maybe some personal days and/or sick days, if you get them) around the holidays outlined in the above tweet.

January

If you get MLK day — January 16, 2023 — off, and you take off the Thursday and Friday beforehand (January 12 and 13), you can block off that five-day stretch.

Total PTO days used: 2

April

If you get Good Friday (April 7) and Easter Monday (April 10) off, and you take off the week leading up to Good Friday, you can take a 10-day vacation.

Total PTO days used: 6

July

By taking off just the Monday before Tuesday, July 4, you can give yourself a four-day break.

Total PTO days used: 7

November

This mega-vacation requires a fair chunk of PTO days, but if you've only taken seven or so earlier in the year, it's time to use 'em up. Take the week before Thanksgiving week, and the days leading up to Thanksgiving, and you've got yourself at least a 16-day break. (The tweet above cites 17 days, but we found 16 here if you assume you have Thanksgiving and the Friday after Thanksgiving off.)

Total PTO days used: 15

December

By taking off just four days after Christmas, you can have a nice, long 10-day holiday vacation.

Total PTO days used: 19

Total vacation days: 45

(The tweet cites 18 days, which probably counts a holiday that we haven't accounted for here — but your own calculations will probably vary, too, and either way, this is still a solid amount of vacation for relatively few PTO days.)

[Image credit: Mateusz Dach via Pexels]

Comments

John Doe 1 year ago

Unfortunately, everyone else takes these dates off, so you have to deal with load balancing at work, high travel costs, and crowds.

But give it a shot!
Robert Nesterowich 1 year ago

This assumes a Monday through Friday work week and a lot of this depends on how you earn PTO and company vacation policies. I've worked for companies where you get all of your PTO after the first calendar day worked and other where you earn X amount of time off per Y hours worked. Vacation time can also be seniority based where people with the most seniority get first pick on days off.

Most companies only allow for six holidays: New Years Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Anything outside of that is bonus and depending on where you work those might not be holidays. Even in banking what used to be holidays are now work days.

The other side of the coin is that not everyone in your group can all be off at the same time, so if you can do this great, but think of your team too. If you're hogging all of the bonus days you're not going to be popular. If you're not fond of your team you might want to think about finding another position rather than shafting your team with your time off.
Mimi McCarthy 1 year ago

I don't know anyone who gets MLK day off. I never had it off, not even when I was in high school. This is a bank holiday. Federal and municipal employees get MLK day as a work holiday.