The legal minimum in the EU (and many countries) is 20 days.

I've seen this enforced once, and everyone was amazed that our colleague hadn't used the minimum 20 days. (We had 30 days according to our contract, but the requirement was for him to take 20. The other 10 were up to him.)

Yeah, I think the average European probably takes more time off than even Americans that think they take a lot of time off.

We get 32 days + public holidays, so you could take something like 7 weeks off with careful planning. Most people do. Because most people do, it isn't looked down upon at all.

A friend at a US firm said they told him if someone could take 3 weeks off then clearly the company didn't need them and there wouldn't be a job to come back to. Here it wouldn't be anything unusual at all.

i remember years ago my wife's friend (we're in US, she was in the UK) commented about how crappy US 'vacation' policies were. She'd been at a place for ... several years, and now had seniority for... at the time it was 11 paid weeks off. It seemed a bit excessive, because it didn't include some national holidays as well, so... basically she had > 3 months 'off' every year. The biggest problem she/they had was trying to figure out stuff to 'do' during that time (visited us in the US for a bit). I think another issue was trying to coordinate her 'time off' with her husband (IIRC he 'only' got 8 weeks paid vacation).

This is good for the company, too. It's a form of fraud detection. When employees take two weeks away in a block, the company can more easily detect ongoing fraud or other funny business going on. That's how a French rogue trader was finally caught:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577615...

Yeah, my mom works at a bank in the US and within her department they have to take off at least 2 weeks consecutively and only that one person in the department can be off during that time for just this reason. They use it as a yearly check to make sure there is no fraud going on.

We have unlimited vacation time I have taken 4 days holiday and 6 days sick leave in the past 12 months (4 days because i was on my ass with the COVID vaccine doses).

I would have normally taken at least 20 days holiday but it seems pointless to take time off to sit at home and do nothing.

This year i have 2 weeks in July and 2 in October and a week for thanksgiving and a week for Christmas.

Take a break!

I took 26 days leave last year (4 pre-Covid), and carried over a few extra. Even with Covid, there were opportunities to take trips locally, or just have a day out of the house with no obligations. I used a few days to work on hobbies when friends were working.

When it's use-it-or-lose it (or, in my case, use-it-or-be-forced-to-use-it-in-crap-weather-December), why work?