I answered this question a couple of years ago, but it still continues to be one of the top questions prospective hires ask me when they are going through the process, so figured it would be a good time for an update.

Paid time off is also referred to as annual leave in the Foreign Service, and it is a accrued just like most other jobs. Every paycheck, you are given a certain number of hours of annual leave and the running total can be seen on your pay stub. For those just joining the FS, it is 4 hours of leave per pay check. At 3 years it increases to 6 hours. After over a decade it will jump to 8 hours.

You might be doing the math and see 4 hours per check x 26 pay checks a year, which comes out to exactly 13 business days of paid leave per year, and think, this isn’t that much time off. I would say it is fairly typical of U.S. businesses, but healthcare providers are used to being able to take a lot of time off. When I was working as a hospitalist doing week on/week off scheduling, I had 2 weeks off every month, so I was a little worried I would have a hard time adjusting to the change.

Thankfully, the department has a few other mechanisms for accumulating leave that weren’t clear to me until I started working.

The first, is compensatory time off. Basically if you do overtime, you can instead choose to take it as extra leave hours instead of extra money. Working as a med provider, you get a lot of weird after hours work, so it wracks up quickly. In my first assignment in Nouakchott I accumulated so much comp time that I never once had to use my actual leave, and by the end of my tour started taking it as actual overtime pay instead. It is also recorded on your paycheck and you have 1 year to use it.

The second mechanism is travel compensatory time off. Basically, if you have to travel for official government business, and the flight times/schedule occur after official business hours, you get to claim all the travel hours spent as more compensatory time off. When you consider many international flights occur in the middle of the night, getting this extra leave is easy and accumulates quickly. Trips to and from the U.S. will often grant over 40 hours of extra leave because the long flights and longer layovers. Since I have joined the department I probably have accumulated over 250 hours of travel comp time, which is roughly a month and a half of leave.

There are also unique forms of leave you can take if you do assignments Special Incentive Posts like Rangoon. Every year I get 20 administrative days of leave that I can use for whatever I want. When I took some leave in October to see my kids, that was admin leave. When I had home for Christmas, some of it will be admin leave.

I have been in the Foreign Service for over two and a half years, and in that time have basically never needed to use my actual annual leave. I have nearly 250 hours of leave sitting around, and still nearly 60 hours of travel comp time. It will also begin to accrue faster next April on my 3 year anniversary when I will begin getting 6 hours per pay check. There is a cap of 360 leave hours you can bank, so eventually I should start using my hefty leave balance so future earning don’t count. Thankfully I am in a part of the world with great travel destinations.

Hope all of that was clear as mud. The bottom line is the system in the Foreign Service is very fair, and it isn’t too difficult to get time away. -Nick