A vacation day is worth $365 at $95k, and $865 at $225k

By Skyler Bissell · August 17, 2026 · 8 min read

A vacation day on a $95,000 New York salary is worth $365 before tax. On $225,000 it is $865. The formula behind both numbers fits on a napkin, salary divided by 260 weekdays, and once you have it, days off stop being a soft perk and start being a line you can price against cash in any offer.

The napkin version is where most articles stop, and it leaves out the half that changes decisions: what a day is worth after tax, and what that means when an employer lets you buy days or sell them back. Those two numbers are what this page adds.

The day-rate ladder

Three New York salaries our pages already publish, run through the engine. The middle row is the entry offer from our first-offer example; the top is the senior engineer scenario.

cityparity engine figures, 2026. Gross day is salary over 260 weekdays; the take-home day divides the engine's after-tax figure for each scenario by the same denominator. The published scenarios are single filers; a household's numbers differ.

Notice the gap between the columns widening as the salary climbs. Progressive brackets mean each rung of the ladder gives more of its marginal day to the taxman, which will matter in a moment when we price buying days.

There is a second reading of the ladder worth a pause. Because the day rate is one 260th of pay at every level, a raise reprices your entire allotment at once: twenty days of leave are worth about $7,300 of gross value at the entry offer and about $17,300 at the senior salary, without a single extra day being granted. Vacation is the one benefit that gets a raise every time you do.

The same day in Berlin and London

Because the day rate is a slice of salary, it travels with pay levels and tax systems. On the $150,000-equivalent salary our comparison pages use, a Berlin day is €496 gross and €294 net; a London day is £427 gross and £295 net. The gross days differ because the same life converts to different local salaries; the net days compress further wherever the payslip works harder.

What the law guarantees alongside the price is its own axis. Berlin comes with 20 statutory vacation days; the UK floor is 5.6 weeks, which GOV.UK states as 28 days that may include the bank holidays, stored in our data as 20 vacation days plus 8 public holidays. The United States guarantees zero paid vacation days by federal law; the U.S. Department of Labor is plain that the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require vacation pay at all. The full statutory picture per country is at vacation days by country. Where a US employer offers unlimited time off instead of an allotment, there is no allotment to price, which is worked through in unlimited PTO against a European entitlement.

Multiply the two axes and you get the number that belongs in an offer comparison: a guaranteed European allotment priced at your day rate is a four-figure annual sum that an American offer has to make up in cash, which is the arithmetic at the heart of how much PTO is worth.

Buying and selling days: why purchased days are cheaper than they look

A growing number of employers, most visibly in the UK and the Netherlands, run holiday purchase schemes: you give up salary equal to your day rate and receive an extra day of leave. The sticker price is the gross day. The cost to your bank account is smaller.

The mechanics do the discounting for you. A purchased day is salary sacrifice, so the pay you give up was going to be taxed before it reached you. Give up a $865 gross day at the senior New York salary and your take-home falls by about $592, the net day. The state quietly funds the difference. If anything that figure overstates the cost, because the sacrificed slice comes off the top of your income at your marginal rate while our net day uses the average; we quote the conservative end.

Selling runs the same pipe in reverse. A bought-back day pays out at the gross rate and is then taxed as ordinary pay, so what lands is the net day. The symmetry has a practical reading: for the same person, a day converts to and from cash at one price, and that price is the net figure. Anyone deciding whether to sell a week back to their employer is choosing between five days of time and roughly $3,000 of spendable money at the senior salary above.

Two cautions before you treat the scheme as free money. Purchase windows are usually capped at a handful of days and priced at base salary, so bonuses and equity sit outside the arithmetic. And a bought day only has value if you can take it; a team culture that quietly prevents leave turns purchased days into a loan you made to your employer.

Using the day rate in an offer

The day rate turns vacation clauses into cash you can negotiate with. Five extra days at the senior New York salary are worth about $4,300 a year of gross compensation, every year, compounding with every raise because the price of a day is a fixed share of pay. When two offers differ on both salary and days, price the days at each offer's own rate and add them in; the comparison usually tightens, and sometimes it flips. Run the full picture, taxes and all, in the New York vs Berlin comparison or the engineer's version of the same pair, and the vacation line arrives already priced.

One shortcut survives every currency. Five days are five 260ths of a working year, just under 2% of salary, so an extra week of leave and a 2% raise are the same size of ask whatever the salary happens to be. Which of the two you want depends on the life the money is funding; putting them in one unit is what makes the choice a real one. When an employer puts both on the table at once, the threshold you need is the break-even pay cut for extra vacation, which sits above the face value on this page for reasons the tax code supplies. And when the unit you want is an hour instead of a day, the real hourly wage method divides the same take-home by the hours the job takes.

FAQ

Why divide by 260 and not by the days you work?

Dividing salary by 260 weekdays prices a marginal day of paid time: what one more or one fewer day is worth inside a package that already pays you for the whole year. Dividing take-home by the days you are at your desk after vacation and holidays answers a different question, your real rate per day worked, and it always comes out higher because the denominator is smaller. Both conventions are legitimate; use the 260 rate for valuing days in an offer and the per-day-worked rate for judging what an hour of your time sells for.

Is unused PTO paid out when you leave a job?

It depends where you work. In the US there is no federal requirement; roughly twenty states, California most prominently, treat accrued vacation as earned wages that must be paid out at termination, and the rest leave it to company policy. In the EU, Article 7 of the Working Time Directive requires payment in lieu of any untaken statutory minimum leave when employment ends, so the floor travels with you. Either way, an unused day converts at your gross day rate and is then taxed as ordinary pay.

How much is a vacation day worth at $100,000?

About $385 before tax: $100,000 divided by 260 weekdays. The formula scales linearly, so every $10,000 of salary adds roughly $38 to the price of a day. What survives tax depends on where you live, which is why the same arithmetic gives a different net figure in New York, Berlin and London.

Do public holidays add to the value of vacation days?

Yes, they are paid days off on top of vacation, priced at the same day rate. Two caveats: some countries observe a holiday on the next working day when it lands on a weekend and some let it lapse, so the effective count is lower than the nominal one in countries without substitution rules; and holidays are fixed dates you cannot spend where you like, so they are worth the same money but less flexibility than a vacation day.

Price the day once and you will never read a vacation clause the same way. Put your own two cities and salary through the engine; the days come back as dollars, or euros, already on the table.

Sources. UK statutory holiday: GOV.UK, holiday entitlement. US federal position: U.S. Department of Labor on vacation leave. EU floor and payment in lieu: Directive 2003/88/EC (EUR-Lex), Article 7. Day values are computed by cityparity's per-city engine from published scenarios; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json.

Day rates use a five-day week; shift patterns and part-time schedules change the denominator. See the methodology.