Why aren’t employees resting? What happens when annual leave isn’t a real break

If we asked you to list the biggest problems related to annual leave, you might say holiday hoarding, clashes and mad scrambles for popular dates, year-end bottlenecks, people missing out because of strict ‘use it or lose it’ carry-over rules, or falling victim to presenteeism and not taking it at all. It’s a pretty common assumption that the biggest problems relate to a lack of time off due to structural or cultural issues. 

But you’d only be half right.

Our benchmark report data showed a very different reality in actual workplaces. The real crisis in workplace rest isn’t about days not used; it’s about how days off are consumed and spent.

To understand the real state of employee time off, we have to forget total allowances and look at actual behaviour. In our report, two numbers stand out:

• 26% of employees record no annual leave at all in a year
• Among those who do take leave, 27% never take a single five-day block. Their longest stretch away from the desk is four days or fewer.

These are big issues, but they are not symptoms of the same disease. They represent two totally separate challenges for people leaders. The first group is completely disconnected from the time-off system and the very idea of taking leave. The second is trapped in a cycle of fragmented leave, taking days here and there in dribs and drabs, but never stepping away long enough for the brain to clock out and the body to truly rest.

The most surprising finding in our data challenges the usual story around unused holiday allowances.

We found that 65% of leave-takers use at least 90% of their allowance. And while 24% of employees do carry days over into a new holiday year, roughly 9 in 10 of those individuals actually end up using those rolled-over days.

This doesn’t tally with most assumptions:

• The ‘unused leave’ figure is deeply misleading. The overall shortfall in time off isn't spread evenly across the workforce as a little bit of hoarding here and there.
• The deficit is concentrated almost entirely in the group taking zero leave.
• For everyone else, allowance is being used – just not in a way that provides real recovery.

Days off can be much better in your imagination than in reality. They’re lovely, but unless you’re taking a mid-week spa day (high five if you are), it’s not restful. 

We’ve all booked ourselves a rest day and then found it to be anything but. You go to bed the night before with grand plans of a lie-in followed by a day of low effort and maximum chill - just a couple of little jobs to tick off first, then it’s a hot date with the bath and/or sofa. But then morning comes, and your brain hasn’t registered the suspension of normal services and wakes up promptly at 6.30am. Since you’re up, you might as well stick a wash on. Do the dishwasher too, while you’re there. Before you know it, it’s 3pm, and you’re knee-deep in packaging, being harassed by incessant Vinted notifications after an impromptu wardrobe clearout. 

By the time you finally start to relax, it’s time to log back in.

Even if you go a step further and book multiple days to account for the life admin creep, it’s still not really enough. It takes more than a few days to silence that inner ‘do stuff, be proactive, hustle’ voice that rules our working week. And the harder we work, the harder we want to play, so the temptation then is to ‘make the most of’ those days off by packing in some fun.

Don’t get us wrong, we’re all for stacking leave to stretch a bank holiday weekend even further, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as a rest (especially if you’re using it to get the most out of festival season). While random Wednesdays and long weekends are great fun and a nice change, they don’t have the same ‘recovery value’ as an extended time away from work (at least five days, a working week) specifically to do something that fills your cup rather than drains it. But if you don’t do this, you return to work just as tired as when you left.

So how do you escape this doom loop of micro-breaks that never compound into real rest? As companies increasingly try progressive policies, many assume more leave is the answer to burnout. But a closer look at our data busts this myth:

In reality, that’s barely a single day’s difference over twelve months.

Giving people more days on paper doesn’t magically change their behaviour or dissolve their workplace anxieties. If you have a culture that discourages downtime, even subtly, an unlimited leave policy only adds decision fatigue and guilt. 

If you’re weighing up a policy overhaul, this is crucial insight: the allowance itself is rarely the primary barrier to rest.

So if employees want time off and, on paper, they can have it, why do they stick to odd days or take nothing at all? 

From what we hear from HR teams, and what the booking patterns suggest, a few friction points come up again and again:

• Workload guilt and cover anxiety: Employees worry that taking a whole week off will bury them in a huge avalanche of catch-up work when they return.
• A lack of visible norms: If senior leadership and peers only ever take long weekends, taking two weeks off feels like a burden and something that just ‘isn’t done’.
• Reactive booking: Our data shows that longer breaks take a lot more planning – blocks of 10 or more days are typically booked around 76 days in advance. When planning is reactive (often because staff are too busy to look that far ahead), proper week-long holidays fall by the wayside.

Tackling the fragmentation problem requires shifting the conversation from how many days people take to how they take them and how they use them. Consider these actionable steps:

• Normalise full-week blocks: Explicitly celebrate and encourage uninterrupted blocks of leave. Make it clear that handing over responsibilities for a week is expected behaviour, not an imposition.
• Segment your strategy: Target your internal communications. The messaging for someone taking zero leave needs to be entirely different from the messaging aimed at someone who only takes scattered Fridays.
• Encourage early planning for big blocks: Because major breaks require extended lead times for cover, be proactive and help teams map out their quarter in advance – ask what holiday they want to take in the next few months, making it clear you expect there to be some. Removing the surprise element kills cover anxiety.
• Look beyond policy tweaks: Don’t waste energy debating allowance caps when the real cultural work lies in building safety nets that let people disconnect with peace of mind.

To explore more benchmarking insights on modern workforce habits – and to discover how tools like Leave Dates help teams visualise coverage, plan ahead, and take guilt-free time off – read the full research report.