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Data

Days off from work for vacations and holidays

Huberman and Minns
See all data and research on:
Working Hours

What you should know about this indicator

  • This data only includes full-time production workers (male and female) in non-agricultural activities.
  • The researchers Huberman and Minns collected the data from multiple sources: the International Labor Organization, the U.S. Department of Labor, the European Industrial Relations Review, the OECD and several national statistics offices.

How is this data described by its producer - Huberman and Minns?

Table 2 gives the number of days off (vacations and national holidays) over the long twentieth century for our sample of countries. We have taken values for 1870 and 1900 from Huberman (2004); those for 1938 to 1990 from a series of contemporary studies of vacation days conducted by the ILO, 1939, 1995, the U.S. Department of Labor (Monthly Labor Review, 1955) and the European Industrial Relations Review (1982); values for 2000 are from a variety of sources, including EIRO (2003), the OECD, 2001, 2004, and official websites.

At the outset, days off were rooted in traditional religious and social calendars and there was much sharing of work patterns across the oceans. Immigrants to the U.S. practiced certain Old World customs and rituals (Gutman, 1973), while Europeans adopted May Day, a U.S. creation. But by 1900, if not earlier, the New World had made a break with Old World habits. Firms with greater investments in fixed capital were under pressure to work as many days as possible and this may be part of the explanation of the divergences that emerged. In Catholic Europe many of the religious festivals had been transformed into secular holidays, and while in certain northern European countries the work year was long, the Old World had on average more than twice the number of days off than their offshoots. Everywhere before 1913 paid holidays and vacations were rare; still, the parallels with the late twentieth century are evident: Europeans had more weeks off than the rest of the world.

Days off from work for vacations and holidays
Huberman and Minns
Average vacation days per year for full-time production workers in non-agricultural activities.
Source
Huberman and Minns (2005) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 5, 2025
Next expected update
August 2026
Date range
1870–2000
Unit
days

Related research and writing

Are we working more than ever?

Charlie Giattino and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Huberman and Minns – Working hours (Huberman and Minns, 2005)

This paper brings a long-term perspective to the debate on the causes of worktime differences among OECD countries. Exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, days at work per year, and annual work hours between 1870 and 2000, we challenge the conventional view that Europeans began to labor fewer hours than Americans only in the 1980s. Like Australians and Canadians, Americans tended to work longer hours, after controlling for income, beginning around 1900. Labor power and inequality, which are held to be important determinants of worktime after 1970, had comparable effects in the period before 1913. To explain the longstanding predisposition of the New World to give more labor time, we examine the effects of three initial factors in 1870, culture, human capital, and geography on hours of work in 2000. We find that geography – the low population density of the New World that has led to shorter commutes and lower fixed costs of getting to work – has had an enduring impact on supply of labor time.

Retrieved on
August 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://ideas.repec.org/p/iis/dispap/iiisdp95.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Huberman, M., & Minns, C. (2005). Hours of Work in Old and New Worlds: The Long View, 1870-2000. Tables 1, 2, and 3. The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp95, IIIS.

This paper brings a long-term perspective to the debate on the causes of worktime differences among OECD countries. Exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, days at work per year, and annual work hours between 1870 and 2000, we challenge the conventional view that Europeans began to labor fewer hours than Americans only in the 1980s. Like Australians and Canadians, Americans tended to work longer hours, after controlling for income, beginning around 1900. Labor power and inequality, which are held to be important determinants of worktime after 1970, had comparable effects in the period before 1913. To explain the longstanding predisposition of the New World to give more labor time, we examine the effects of three initial factors in 1870, culture, human capital, and geography on hours of work in 2000. We find that geography – the low population density of the New World that has led to shorter commutes and lower fixed costs of getting to work – has had an enduring impact on supply of labor time.

Retrieved on
August 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://ideas.repec.org/p/iis/dispap/iiisdp95.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Huberman, M., & Minns, C. (2005). Hours of Work in Old and New Worlds: The Long View, 1870-2000. Tables 1, 2, and 3. The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp95, IIIS.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Days off from work for vacations and holidays”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2020) - “Working Hours”. Data adapted from Huberman and Minns. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-091537/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.html [online resource] (archived on March 18, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Huberman and Minns (2005) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Huberman and Minns (2005) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Days off from work for vacations and holidays – Huberman and Minns” [dataset]. Huberman and Minns, “Working hours (Huberman and Minns, 2005)” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-091537/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.html (archived on March 18, 2026).

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/days-of-vacation-and-holidays.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear