Anonymous wrote:Why do people keep the carryover max? When do you plan to use it? I'm FINALLY hitting 240 the first pay period of 2022, after many years of taking just a week in the summer, the day after Thanksgiving, and a week at Christmas off all year. Should I try to keep it near the cap? Why? If I ever leave the feds, that's a lot of time I'll never get back.

You get paid annual leave if you were to leave feds. It’s the sick leave that you can’t get back unless you return to the gov.

Why do people keep the carryover max? When do you plan to use it? I'm FINALLY hitting 240 the first pay period of 2022, after many years of taking just a week in the summer, the day after Thanksgiving, and a week at Christmas off all year. Should I try to keep it near the cap? Why? If I ever leave the feds, that's a lot of time I'll never get back.

I like to keep two weeks or so just in case there is an emergency or death of one of my west coast relatives and I need to go and spend a little time there.

2 weeks, but we don’t have separate sick leave so I keep those for emergencies.

I'm a fed as well. my program is really forcing people to take time off (no carry over beyond 240 max). i think they are concerned how it may look that people work from home and still carry over max allowed. so 240 for me and my coworkers

I’m a relatively new fed earning 4 hours (no I couldn’t negotiate) and I’m actually going to run through most of it his year but only because I’m taking a huge chunk of time at the end of the year. Normally I don’t do that.

I’m a Fed and bank as much as I can. With alternate work schedule + 11 public holidays, i really don’t need to use a ton of vacation time. The WFH trend makes it even easier to go away without using much vacation time.

I can bank 9 weeks and am always at use it or lose it. When my kids were little I always liked 3 weeks in case of illness or snow days. Then I just accumulated to the max because I get so much better it’s hard to use it all.

I'm a fed in the highest leave category and some years I struggle to use all my leave so I've been trying to spread it out more during the year and kept up with taking leave during the pandemic. This year I'm carrying over about 210 hours.

I started at 0 as well and accrue 9ish hours a month. I like to have about 2 weeks in my bank. Next year we are going on a 3 week vacation so I’m happy I have enough for that without stressing. I have a separate bank of comp leave though because I take hours instead of OT. So like if I work 8 hours of OT I bank 12 hours of comp hours. I use comp hours for childcare issues, needing to get off early, stuff like that. I save my AL for actual vacations.

I’m a fed with 15 years in, so I earn 27 days a year. Most of my vacation time is spent at our second home in Rehoboth so during covid I barely used any leave because I could telework. I am going to lose about 5 days of use or lose this year because of that and I’ll carry over 30 days. I suspect I will be in the position of max carry over going forward as long as we are able to continue telework 3 days a week or more.

I used to hoard it and now I spend it regularly and keep about 7 days in the bank. It’s part of your overall compensation. If you wait until you quit and take a payout, think of all the time you spent working instead of living.

We can’t carry over, so I don’t worry about a bank.

We can use all of our leave for the year at anytime. I guess we would pay it back if we were in the hole when we left the company.

I like to have two weeks, but it doesn't always happen that way

I just started a new job and am starting from zero, which I hate. I generally like to use my leave but like to have at least a couple of weeks banked in case we want to take a longer trip and so taking an odd day off here or there doesn’t feel like I’m sacrificing travel time. How much leave do you like to have banked?