What 744,000 leave requests tell us about how we really take time off

Do you know whether your team’s time-off habits are healthy, operationally sound, or quietly driving burnout? It’s a level of deep insight few managers have access to, despite the strategic advantages it can provide.

Luckily, we have that insight. Based on an anonymised snapshot of real usage – spanning ~744,000 requests, 1.7 million leave days and 190,000 employees – the Leave Dates Benchmark Report offers an up-to-date, data-backed overview to compare your own trends to.

This report will help you to optimise your workforce coverage, boost your team’s wellbeing, change your policy, or find inefficiencies lurking in the background.

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The story in six lines

When you download the full report, you’ll find comprehensive and detailed insights. But to get you started, here are the six big takeaways from our report:

1. Approval is fast and low friction

Across the dataset, the vast majority of requests are approved (just 1.6% are rejected), and for a third of these, approval comes within the hour. If the process is already fast, what else could be stopping your people from taking leave? Ruling out any admin friction means you can find and solve the real cultural issues.

2. Longer breaks are under-utilised

Of employees who took leave, around a quarter didn’t take a full week off during the year. Even more worryingly, a quarter took no annual leave at all. Why? Think about your team – who never seems to take a break? Burnout rarely comes out of nowhere. The red flags are there if you know where to look, and annual leave trends should be your first port of call.

3. Carry-over is mostly used rather than lost

Currently, 54% of employees have a carry-over policy available, and about 24% actually carry days into the new year. The good news? Roughly 9 in 10 of those people successfully use their time rather than letting it expire. The takeaway for HR is clear: you do not need to just remind people the policy exists. Instead, you need to actively nudge them to book that time before their deadline hits.

4. Public holidays create predictable ‘bridging’

Time off peaks sharply in December (15% of annual leave) and August, with 72% of companies seeing staff stretch public holidays into long weekends at 1.4 times the normal rate. We call this ‘leave stacking’. If you see this kind of clustering, is that smart planning from your team, or are they playing it safe by requesting time off around holiday ‘defaults’ that are already half-sanctioned? Maybe you could get a more even leave spread with a comms or culture shift.

5. Requests wait on the weekend

While mid-week requests take hours to resolve, those sent on Saturday wait a median of 47 hours (about 9x longer), creating a lovely Monday morning queue. If you’re waiting to send your most-feared emails until 5pm Friday, what does that say about end-of-the-week leave requests?

6. The Friday ‘sickie’ is a myth

Despite popular opinion, reported sick days are actually lowest on Fridays (with Friday spikes driven by planned annual leave), and actually peak on Mondays and Tuesdays. Are you managing based on old tropes? Could this myth be driving presenteeism in staff who don’t want to look like they’re faking it?

So what’s actually going on?

When you connect the dots, there’s a pattern: the leave management is pretty slick – the friction lies in culture and habit.

Managers often waste time tweaking sign-off workflows or debating formal policies, assuming slow approvals or clunky systems are delaying time off. But with 62% of manager-reviewed requests signed off within a day, the bottleneck is not admin.

The real challenge is operational impact and behavioural habits: employees taking single, fragmented days off instead of deep rest; teams hitting massive staffing gaps on the same bridge days; and unwritten rules keeping people from using their full allowance. Knowing that the process works is incredibly useful info, because it tells you exactly where not to waste energy so you can focus on building a healthy leave culture.

Why this is worth your time

You’re busy, we get it. That’s the point. This isn’t another generic listicle imploring you vaguely to “look after your team” and “get some rest.” This is real, actionable insight based on hard benchmarks you can use to evaluate your operational reality. When you sit down with this report, you will get:

An unbiased benchmark: Compare your team’s approval speeds, sick leave logging and break durations against real market data using our robust leave management software.
Red flags: Tells you what to look for (eg employees with zero recorded leave) and what to surface so you can help those at risk of burnout.
Filter for sector and size: It’s a big report, but organised – it’s a 5-minute read when you skim for sector and size, so you can compare your business to actual peers, not overall global averages.
Ammo for leadership: Back up your requests for clear leave limits, carry-over adjustments, or coverage tools using concrete figures that executives respect.
Actionable frameworks: Explore practical tools like a tailored Annual Leave Policy Guide and an intuitive Staff Holiday Booking System to easily set team caps.

Grab the full report

We’re not ones to gate-keep, and we want you to know this stuff, so the complete Leave Dates Benchmark Report is available here.

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