I am a traveler at heart and want to see the world. I started a new job very recently and I have only accrued about 12 hours of vacation after five weeks. In the first year of service, I accrue approximately 4.7 hours of PTO biweekly. After one year, it will go up to 5.3 hours of PTO biweekly and will continue to rise up to a maximum of 8.3 hours after 15 years.
4.7 hrs/pay period sounds so low to me especially since it has to cover sick time as well. I almost feel as though I will not be able to travel the world often with a full-time job. HR says that I can request unpaid time off if I want and with a PRN job and no debt, but I am not sure how realistic that would be.
Is it possible to be able to travel often with a full time job with these accrual rates? And by often, I mean every six months take a couple weeks off to go over seas and then schedule myself in a way where I can take a long stretch of days off without having to touch my vacation time for other smaller trips.
It accrues up to a maximum of 80 hours per pay. So if I worked forty hours per week I would receive 128 hours for the year or about 3 weeks.
Do yours roll over?
It varies of course, but the average is 2 weeks of vacation time for one full time year worked, excluding sick time. Three weeks sounds right for the first two years of employment.
Specializes in Mental Health, Gerontology, Palliative.
I accrue 4 weeks paid holiday leave per year. Amount of hours depends on the amount of hours I work. So if I work part time eg 20 hours I would get paid for 20 hours per week, if I work more than that I get paid for the same amount of hours per week of leave
We also get a minimum of five paid days of sick leave a year. My last job gave me 8 days and I worked at one place that gave us 10 days a year.
You'd have similar conditions but better pay and pension if you went to Australia
When I started my job 3-4 years ago I was accruing about 10 hours per pay period. It's went up a little since then with experience.
I have more more than enough time off for sick and holidays. I can take three weeks off per year and not be hurting for pto. I spread them out but we have had folks who take 2-3 weeks off at a time (not during prime time - summer and Thanksgiving to New Year) to travel. Just depends on if others have asked for a specific time off.
Specializes in Nurse Leader specializing in Labor & Delivery.
4.7 hours per pay period sounds like the low end of normal to me. I assume you're a .9? I'm 1.0 and my facility gives me 6 hours per pay period for the first 4 years.
Assuming you're .9, I calculated out your annual PTO to be ~136 hours a year. That's a bit more than 11 shifts. At 3 shifts a week, that's not quite 4 weeks of PTO. So yeah, if you're never sick, you could take 2 2-week vacations a year.
I accrue 5.3 PTO hours biweekly and I feel that as long as you are not taking PTO a lot, you will get enough hours to take a week off here and there.
That's the thing, I will need more than a week off to take an international trip. I'm talking at least twelve to fourteen days (or six to eight PTO days). I was hoping to be able to do two trips per year, one two-week vacation in early spring (April/May) and another in the fall (September/October).
I have done the calculations, and the only real way for me to do this is to not use any PTO for at least an entire year and build up my PTO, take a two-week vacation and then in the six months in between vacations, I will have enough time accrued for an additional two week vacation. Fortunately, I am able to roll over 100% of my PTO up to a little over 300 hours.
I accrue 8 hours of PTO biweekly, so that does sound really low. The people with the longest length of service accrue 10.77 hours biweekly. I end up accruing way more than that sometimes because it's based on hours worked, so if I work overtime I accrue more PTO. I don't think we cap it a certain number of hours per pay period.
However, my job makes it obnoxiously difficult to use. Most people take a PTO day and then still work three days that week just to have extra money on the check and to use up the PTO. Our vacation planner comes out in October and only two people are allowed to take a week off at a time, so you really have to know by October what weeks you want off the next year and you have to get to the vacation planner to write those weeks down before someone else does. As the vacation planner works by seniority, this means that even if you get to the vacation planner the day it becomes available to you, if other people with more seniority than you wanted that week, it's gone.
This is the best PTO accrual I have had, but the worst job for actually being able to take vacations. There's more to taking vacations than having the PTO to do it, for sure.
VANurse2010
1,526 Posts
That's craziness. I accrue 10% of hours worked per pay period in PTO. For me, that's 8 hours every two weeks.