That doesn't necessarily mean it's "unlimited". It could be that you get eight weeks and they just don't say so.

I think most people understand that "unlimited" does not mean you can take half the year off. It means there is no hard limit and it is up to a discussion between you and your manager. 8 weeks is pretty generous.

I imagine it's really hard for employers to balance that, though.

A good employer wants employees to take the time off they need without worrying about running out of PTO to do the stuff they want. They don't want an employee to ever have to think "Shit, if I take that day off for a dentist appointment, then I won't have enough PTO for that weeklong trip to Hawaii!"

But if you try to avoid this scenario by being extremely generous and declare an explicit 8-week PTO policy, then you will have people using 6-8 weeks PTO. Even as someone that strongly values work-life balance and PTO, 8 weeks is pretty nuts. If everyone took 8 weeks PTO every year, that would be pretty costly and could significantly impact productivity. 8 weeks is 1/6th of the year! It would cause chaos with people frequently coming in and out of the office.

So I think an unlimited policy sounds good, but expectations have to be set. Personally, I'd like to see it paired with a 10-day MINIMUM policy, with at least one full week off.

I guess to someone in the US, 8 weeks sounds like a lot. But, especially if you consider holidays and sick time, 6-8 weeks total over the course of a year doesn't seem unreasonable. I've been in that range for total nonweekend days off for much of my recent career.

It depends a lot on the company in the US.

If we're including holidays, I've seen plenty of companies that do 4 weeks PTO + 8-9 holidays which is just shy of 6 weeks, and there some that do 5-6 weeks PTO after you've been there for a number of years.

But there are also ones where you basically get no PTO. Presumably (hopefully?) you get paid more money to work at these places, but I've never found them worth investigating.

I don't include holidays in that total.

Yes, at my work the manager made it clear he expects people to take time off -- often getting then to take the minimum is a struggle.