I'm a contract employee that gets paid by the hour, so I get absolutely no paid vacation whatsoever. No worky, no money. I can still take days off, but for this reason I rarely do.

Between statutory holidays, the week between Christmas and New Year's and a few days off here and there, I get maybe 20 days off a year.

In UK I have 35 days minimum but can agree up to 45. Then there's all the public holidays, etc.

But in truth I never book official holidays as I work in a small team that's sales focused - so we can take off pretty much what we like to long as our team achieves it's targets (something the recession has been making a lot tougher...).

I'd guess I normally take around 40 days on average plus the public holidays.

Interesting to note Kow's reply. Everyone I know with their own business tends to take less holidays that those of us employed by others... guess when it's your own company you want to make sure things are going well and no doubt it's harder to disappear for 3 weeks trusting all is ticking over nicely.

Well I already said how much I get off per year.   It depends on who you are talking about,  office workers? Laborers? People who work in Retail?   It varies greatly depending on the job

Yeah that's an interesting sidenote Reasonable.

I'll make sure that I either don't start my own business, or that I have a trustworthy backup to leave in charge of stuff if I do.

23 days...But I need to take them or othwerise I have to pay them(the government) back vacation money (that they give)

That is for working five days a week....

But I also work extra (in the weekends) I feel lazy when I am at home in the weekend...

20 which is basically the minimum I can be given. EU law states I should have 28 but this includes public holidays.

I can take time off in time in lieu though, so if I work extra one week, take time off the next.

I looked up the average retirement age in the US, it seems to be 62 years old. I doubt this is even 3-5 years less than European countries, and it obviously isn't anywhere near 10 years less...

Some people seem to talk a lot about early retirement but end up never doing it, I wonder if that's the case for a lot of people in the US?

Personally I'd rather enjoy my time off right now when my mind and my body are fresh, rather than having an earlier retirement.

Where did I say that everyone works for early retirement and everyone get there 3-5 years early or even 10 years early?

It's not that I don't want to take the time off, I don't want to use my days.  I like to collect things and then almost hoard them (I'm not really a hoarder, I just like things).  I know I have a limited number of vacation days so I would rather just save them than use them.

Well, I do that as well. The difference is, that I use half of my days off per year to travel the world for three weeks and you could do that just every couple or three years.

So with my cultural background, I must say that I think that you're exploited...