Ask HN: How many vacations do you take a year?

A Swedish perspective:

By law you are granted 25 days vacation per year, assuming you have worked enough to "earn them", generally you get 12.5-13.x% extra salary per day worked that goes towards your vacation.

The law also says that you have a right to 4 weeks uninterrupted vacation during the June, July and August. At least two months before the (requested) vacation you must get a definitive decision. The employers are not allowed, by law, to change their mind about granted vacation time.

I believe I saw a study that recommended shorter, more frequent, vacations as the best way to recover from mental fatigue but I assume that there is a lot of opposing opinions on that matter.

I used to take one long trip every year or so, with 6-9 months on the road, climbing, surfing, and otherwise just wandering about until it started to get old or I missed using my brain and needed to run home and land another contract.

That lasted for about 10 years, but I've slowed down a bit now.

These days I seldom take more than six weeks truly "off", with all tools down and no hours billed. Instead I tend to move around to places that have the things I want to do, set up shop, and do my "vacationing" on nights, weekends, and the odd afternoon off. There are cheap-ish rental houses/apartments with good wifi pretty much everywhere in the world now. If you can work remote, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be working remote. Like, all the time.

It actually works out pretty well this way. I get way more climbing/surfing in than I used to when I was contracting in LA to save for the next trip, and I get to have a house with an office, comfy couch, etc.

Thank you, software industry, for making us pretty much the only class of individual on the planet who can pull this off!

In the UK the legal minimum is 28 days. In theory you can take the days however you want. In practice though you usually have to negotiate when to take them with your boss. They have to allow you to take them all off at some point in the year though so they're usually pretty accommodating.

I've always been surprised at how little people get in the US. Given that it's a wealthy nation it seems to lag considerably behind European countries in this regard.

You have a right to take it during that summer period. You don't have to but your employer are not required to grant you four weeks of uninterrupted vacation during say November.

Many Swedes have summer houses that they go to during the summer when the kids are on summer break from school. There is also a so called "Industrial Vacation" during July, where many companies at least partially close for a month, this is especially true for manufacturing.

That's really great, so in the past you only work during 3-6 months?