People from Virginia clearly love to travel - at least, that’s what a new study on how vacation time is used across the US shows, with Virginians using the second most vacation time, and doing the most traveling with those days off. Getting time off is one of the biggest impediments to travel for most people, along with the issue of affording trips all over the world. After all, travel may be lauded as one of the best things that someone can do with their life, but keeping a job is usually a higher priority!

In the US, getting vacation time is notoriously difficult, and the US is the only developed country with no legally mandated paid vacation time. In the European Union, workers must have a minimum of twenty days paid vacation a year, while Canadians get 10-20 paid vacation days and 6-10 paid national holidays off. However, in the US, paid time off can be rare, which makes travel difficult - but a new study shows that some states are definitely managing it, and Virginia and Colorado are doing it best.

The data comes from Project Time Off, and looks at both how many vacation days people are taking in each state, and how many of those days are devoted to travel. Colorado, Virginia and Arizona are the three states taking the most time off, with vacation days averaging 20.3, 18.9 and 18.8 respectively (although in none of these states are people taking all the vacation time that they earn). When it comes to using that time for travel, however, it’s Virginia, Colorado and New Jersey folks that use the bulk of their time off to actually go somewhere else. Virginians used 64% of their time off for travel, compared to New Jersey’s 63% and Colorado’s 58%.

Bottom of the list when it comes to travel and time off are Montana, where people take the lowest number of days off (16.3), and South Dakota, where people use only a measly 26% of their 16.6 days off to travel.

From this data, it’s clear that Virginia and Colorado are the states with the most travel-happy residents, which may mean happier people in general, as the State Of American Vacation 2018 found that those people who use the bulk of their time off for travel are happier with their personal relationships, careers, and overall well-being. Of course, there are plenty of reasons that people may choose not to take time off, or not to use that time for travel and leisure; friends and family with ill health, vacation used for maternity or paternity leave, lack of funds to leave home on vacation, or simply a desire to take the increasingly popular ‘staycation’ can all be contributing factors to these figures. However, if you want to see how your state ranks against the rest, you can go to the interactive map on the Project Time Off website.

Source: Project Time Off