The length of vacation for German residents directly depends on salary level
As "Russkaya Germaniya" writes, the longest vacations are enjoyed by those German workers who are not shortchanged by fate and earn significantly above average. According to calculations by experts at the Hamburg-based consulting firm Compensation Partner – which has the country's largest database of employment contract terms for German residents – almost every second German worker has at least 30 vacation days per year. The average length of paid vacation in Germany is 28 working days, and overall vacation duration strongly depends on the industry and its salary level. The criteria are quite simple: the more an employer pays, the longer they allow their employees to rest.
Thus, in Germany, legal advisors, waiters, and tax specialists have the least time off: their average vacation length does not exceed 26 days. The most generous in terms of time off are the banking sector and the automotive industry: here, paid vacation reaches 29 days, and almost 90 percent of employees in these high-paying industries take 30 days off per year.
To prepare the study, Compensation Partner experts evaluated data voluntarily provided by specialists and managers on the large internet portal Gehalt.de (which provided information on salaries and vacation lengths of 221,000 employees) and supplemented it with information obtained from human resources departments of many German companies. Statistics suggest that vacation length is directly related to salary level: when annual income exceeds 51,000 euros, vacation is usually at least 29 days. If earnings do not exceed 20,000 euros per year, paid vacation is shorter – on average no longer than 25 days.
In addition to salary, vacation length also directly depends on the region where the employee works. For example, the longest paid vacations are enjoyed by workers living in Baden-Württemberg: in southwestern Germany, companies provide an average of 28 vacation days. In Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the average vacation length does not exceed 26 days.
It should be noted, however, that these data only indicate the entitlement to vacation days. How many days workers in the west or east of the country actually took is unknown. Another study, commissioned about a year ago by the German Trade Union Federation (DGB), found that every third German worker gives up several days of their entitled vacation due to operational necessity.