160 million days: Australians hoarding their leave days

'The holiday season is the perfect time of year to encourage staff to take an extended break'

BY Dexter Tilo 08 Nov 2024

Employers across Australia should encourage staff to take an extended break following new findings that employees are not using their leave days despite feeling burnt out.

This is according to the latest ELMO Employee Sentiment Index (ESI) report, which surveyed over 1,000 employees to find an average of 160 million days of unused leave across Australia.

An average employee has just under 16 days of leave due, which rises to over four weeks of unused annual leave for 22% of the respondents. By generation, older employees have larger leave balances than their younger counterparts:

Baby Boomers (19.9 days)
Gen X (20.3 days)
Millennials (14.9 days)
Gen Z (8.8 days)

The high number of unused leave days comes despite the strong necessity for employees to take breaks, according to the report. It discovered that 43% of employees are already feeling burnt out and 43% report their workload has increased this quarter.

"The holiday season is the perfect time of year to encourage staff to take an extended break, maximising their leave with the additional public holidays," said Joseph Lyons, chief executive officer of ELMO Software, in a statement.

Barriers to using leave days

But taking leave days isn't easy for employees, with 61% of the respondents saying there is a barrier to going on leave, such as:

Too busy at work (21%)
They couldn't afford to go away on holiday (18%)

Some 38% of employees also feel the need to work longer and harder to keep their jobs secure as 29% anticipate redundancies in the next quarter, according to the report.

"With workers feeling burnt out dealing with increased workloads, taking a break to spend time with family and friends has never been more important. They can start the year feeling fresh and ready to hit the ground running," Lyons said.