“The purpose of home leave is to ensure that employees who live abroad for an extended period undergo reorientation and re-exposure in the United States on a regular basis.” -Foreign Affairs Manual.

Since I am on home leave for the very first time, I thought I would take an opportunity to explain exactly what it is.

Home leave is a congressionally mandated leave all Foreign Service employees must take after living overseas for 18 consecutive months. It became law with the passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980 and is intended as a way for us to reacquaint ourselves with the motherland. You are only allowed to take home leave in the United States and its territories, but absolutely no trips abroad.

For each month you serve abroad, you acquire 1 day of home leave, so at the end of a 2 year tour, you will have 24 or 25 days accrued. At a minimum, each employee must take 20 days of home leave for a tour over two years, and a maximum of 45 days. One year tours require 10 days of home leave between assignments. Weekends and holidays don’t count, so basically taking the minimum 20 days will shake out to having a full month of leave. Home leave is its own separate leave bank, so it doesn’t exhaust any other type of leave you might have. You also get to take home leave if transitioning from a foreign posting to a domestic assignment, which is really nice if you need extra time to find a place to live.

Now that we have that settled, I have to say that home leave is an awesome benefit, but it does have some downsides. For one, it can be VERY expensive. The second you leave post, you lose all your differentials. So right now I am no longer receiving my hardship differential or cost of living differential I was receiving in Nouakchott, which was nearly 40% of my paycheck. If you are like many foreign service employees that sold your home when you joined, you don’t have a real “home base” anymore. You are either couch surfing with relatives, or ponying up for hotels/airbnb, which for an entire month can really add up in cost. The desire to eat at all your favorite places also adds up in cost. Folks with kids will want to fill their summer with things to do, which also adds up. Based on Facebook feeds of service members I know, it feels like no home leave is complete without a Disney trip, and those basically require a second mortgage. Many go to Hawaii or Puerto Rico for a more exotic home leave experience, which again, is quite expensive. The sarcastic joke is it should be renamed “homeless leave”.

Our circumstance this go round is nice in that we still have our Texas home, and Angeli has been living in the home for the last few months, so there aren’t many hidden costs. Since she is also working, and took some leave when she helped us PCS back, we don’t have too many grand vacations planned during this period, so I won’t be going bankrupt. We are truly treating it as a relaxing time back home in El Paso, seeing family and friends.

One thing I wonder is how often diplomats in 1980 got to return back to the U.S. during their tours abroad. The world is a lot more connected 44 years later. In my 2 years in Mauritania I got to return back to the U.S. 3 times. Once for 10 days, once for 21 days, and once for 14 days. I definitely didn’t feel a disconnect from the U.S., and with facetime and international cell phone plans, talking with your family and keeping that connection isn’t as difficult. Still, I appreciate the benefit and understand the reasoning for it. It’s definitely a little culture shock walking into a Target or Walmart and being able to buy whatever you want, often with a single item having multiple competing brands, check out yourself, and then hop in your car and enjoy our great road system with civilized driving. Things you definitely don’t appreciate until you don’t have them. I’m all for it. -Nick