Give It a Rest People: South Dakotans Pass on Vacation at High Rate

We know we work hard in South Dakota.

It might be time to take a good, hard look at our behavior, if a new study is any indication.

An analysis by Project: Time Off found that South Dakota ranks fourth in the nation in the rate of workers not taking all their vacation time.

The organization, funded primarily the tourism industry, conducted an online survey of more than 7,000 American workers who work more than 35 hours and receive paid time off.

A rather stunning 73 percent of South Dakotans in the survey said they didn’t take all their vacation days. That amounted to 1.8 million unused vacation days, according the group’s analysis.

Idaho ranked first at 78 percent and Maine was the most vacation-taking state with just 36 percent of workers reporting they didn’t take the time allotted.

(I’ve always thought Maine seemed an odd and suspicious place. Now we know why.)

From the study:

South Dakotan workers are the most likely to skip time off due to workload, with 60 percent saying the mountain of work they would return to was a barrier to taking vacation, compared to 43 percent nationally. The Mount Rushmore State’s workers are also the number one state for fearing they would lose consideration for a raise or promotion if they took time off. It is paradoxical thinking as The State of American Vacation 2017 found that workers who forfeit vacation time are less likely to have received a recent raise or bonus (78% to 84%) or been promoted (23% to 27%) than those who did not.

You can download the entire study here. It's an interesting read.

Project: Time Off also ranked the country’s 30 largest Metropolitan areas.

This may go against the stereotype, but Washington, D.C., was the top of the list of cities with 64 percent of workers not taking full vacations. The hard working steel town of Pittsburg had the lowest rate at 40 percent.

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