Forty-one percent of full-time US workers have taken a “quiet vacation” this year, according to ResumeBuilder’s 2025 survey of 1,200 workers, up sharply from roughly 1 in 10 the year before. Quiet vacationing describes exactly what it sounds like: taking time off without formally requesting PTO, then maintaining the appearance of working, scheduling emails, keeping a status light active, joining calls from a hotel room, so no one notices the person isn’t actually at their desk.
It’s an odd, quietly telling behavior. Employees aren’t refusing to take time off, and they aren’t asking for more of it either. They’re taking it anyway, just without telling anyone, which says less about laziness and more about exactly how much trust currently exists between employees and the organizations they work for.
The Scale of the Trend
This isn’t a fringe behavior anymore. Nearly half of workers have either taken or seriously considered taking a quiet vacation, and among those who have, most did it more than once, 48% took two to three quiet vacation days this year, 28% took four to five, and 11% took six or seven, according to ResumeBuilder’s data. Fourteen percent admitted to outright lying to their manager about their location during one of these breaks.
Younger and more senior employees are leading the trend, not avoiding it. Gen Z workers, executives, and in-person employees are the groups most likely to quiet vacation, according to the same research, a pattern that cuts against the assumption that this is purely a junior-employee or remote-work phenomenon. Six in ten Gen Z workers reported quiet vacationing over a single recent summer period alone.
The financial scale of unused time off is enormous. American workers leave an estimated $312 billion worth of unused vacation time on the table annually, and only 48% of employees use their full PTO allocation. That’s the real backdrop against which quiet vacationing makes sense: employees aren’t taking less time off because they need it less. They’re taking the same time off through a channel that doesn’t require asking.
Why Employees Are Choosing to Hide It Rather Than Request It
Anxiety about asking is the single biggest driver. More than 30% of workers say they’re simply too anxious to ask for time off in the first place, and about half of employees report feeling nervous requesting PTO at all, a figure that climbs to 58% for Gen Z and 61% for millennials, according to a Harris Poll survey. That anxiety exists even in organizations where formal policy fully supports taking the time; the fear isn’t about policy, it’s about perception.
Fear of falling behind compounds the anxiety around asking. Nearly 52% of employees worry they’ll return to an overwhelming backlog if they properly disconnect, making the quiet, unofficial version of a break feel safer than the fully disconnected, formally requested one, since staying quietly reachable means the backlog never fully forms in the first place.
Career and job security concerns are explicit, not vague. Around 30% of workers specifically believe that taking an authorized vacation day would make them appear less committed or hardworking, and a similar share worry that using PTO could increase their risk of being laid off. These aren’t abstract cultural vibes; they’re concrete, stated beliefs about how time off is actually perceived and potentially punished.
Remote and hybrid work has made disconnecting harder, not easier. Sixty-five percent of Gen Z and millennial employees report specifically struggling to disconnect while working from home, with “pressure to always be available” cited as one of the two biggest barriers to genuine time off, alongside heavy workload itself.
What Quiet Vacationing Actually Reveals About Workplace Culture
The behavior itself is a useful diagnostic. Quiet vacationing tends to appear specifically in cultures where the stated PTO policy and the lived experience of using it have quietly diverged, employees technically have generous time off on paper, but the informal, unwritten rules around using it visibly punish the people who actually do. As one HR consultant put it in reporting on the trend, quiet vacationing allows employees to avoid using up vacation days while still getting some work done, which is a rational, if quietly corrosive, adaptation to a workplace that says one thing and rewards another.
This is precisely the say-do gap showing up in a new form. An organization can offer unlimited PTO, four weeks of vacation, or generous holiday policy, and still produce widespread quiet vacationing if the actual incentive structure, who gets promoted, who’s seen as most committed, continues to favor constant visible availability over genuine rest.
“In short, employees aren’t hiding their vacations because they don’t trust the PTO policy. They’re hiding them because they don’t trust what happens to people who actually use it out loud.” — Mr. Amit Kapoor, Founder of Balanz & Beonn
Why This Should Concern Employers Directly
Quiet vacationing defeats the actual purpose of rest. An employee who spends their vacation checking email, joining calls, and maintaining the appearance of working gets essentially none of the psychological recovery benefit real time off is meant to provide. The organization pays the same underlying cost, an employee who isn’t truly recharging, while also losing visibility into actual workload and capacity, since managers can’t accurately assess team bandwidth when time off is happening invisibly.
It signals a trust deficit that tends to show up elsewhere too. An employee uncomfortable being honest about needing a break is unlikely to be fully honest about struggling with workload, burnout, or other concerns either. Quiet vacationing is rarely an isolated behavior; it’s usually one visible symptom of a broader reluctance to be transparent with leadership about capacity and wellbeing.
It undermines planning and coverage. When time off happens unofficially, teams can’t properly plan coverage, projects can’t account for someone’s actual availability, and the organization loses the basic operational benefit that a formal PTO system is designed to provide in the first place.
What Actually Helps
Make leadership’s own PTO use visible and normal. Since so much of this behavior is driven by fear of appearing less committed, leaders who visibly and fully disconnect during their own time off send a far stronger signal than any written policy update.
Separate PTO usage explicitly from performance evaluation, and say so directly rather than assuming employees already know it. Given how specific and widespread the fear of career consequences is, vague reassurance isn’t enough; the disconnect between policy and perceived reality needs direct, repeated correction.
Address workload before or alongside any PTO messaging. Since fear of returning to an overwhelming backlog is one of the strongest deterrents to genuine disconnection, coverage planning and realistic workload management matter as much as any cultural messaging about taking real time off.
Treat rest and recovery as core corporate wellness infrastructure, not a policy line sitting separately from daily culture. A genuinely comprehensive wellness strategy accounts for the gap between what a PTO policy says and what employees actually feel safe doing with it. Corporate wellness events are increasingly being organised specifically to help close this gap, sessions on genuine disconnection, manager training on modeling healthy time-off behavior, and open conversations normalizing real, undisguised rest, rather than leaving the topic to an occasional line in the employee handbook.
Some organizations are working with a specialized corporate wellness company to address this properly, since shifting a culture where quiet vacationing has become normalized usually requires more coordinated, structural work than a single policy reminder can accomplish on its own.
The Bottom Line
Why are employees quiet vacationing instead of taking real time off? Because for a large and growing share of the workforce, the safest way to actually get a break is to hide it, a rational response to a culture where the written PTO policy and the unwritten rules about using it have drifted apart. The behavior itself isn’t the real problem. It’s a visible symptom of a deeper trust gap between what organizations say about rest and what they actually reward, and closing that gap requires more than encouraging people to take their vacation days. It requires making sure nothing bad actually happens to the people who do.
