71% of workers now get paid leave, BLS says, but only 32% of part-timers and 45% in service jobs

Seventy-one percent of U.S. wage and salary workers had access to paid leave at their main job in 2024-25, up from 66% in 2017-18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday in The Economics Daily. Access rose to 72.6% for men from 66.8%, and to 69.3% for women from 65.0%.

The figures come from a leave module attached to the American Time Use Survey, published in full in the BLS release Access to and Use of Leave on Aug. 26. The BLS cautions that 2024-25 data are not strictly comparable with earlier years and that its comparisons do not control for factors such as the mix of full-time and part-time work.

The gap behind the average

In the private sector, access rose to 69% from 63%. Public-sector workers were at 81%. But the spread inside the private workforce is much wider than the headline suggests:

The workers least likely to have paid leave are the part-time, younger, hourly staff that restaurants, bars, salons and trade contractors hire most. That is where the benchmark matters for an owner.

Who it actually hits

Our own database counts about 919,000 independent restaurants, bars and coffee shops in the U.S., and about 271,000 construction, plumbing, electrical, HVAC and roofing businesses. In those trades, the BLS figures say roughly half or fewer of the workers doing the jobs have any paid leave.

Read one way, that means a small employer that offers even a few paid days is ahead of the typical offer for service and construction work, which is a hiring argument worth making in a job post. Read the other way, the steady rise in the overall figure means the baseline candidates compare against is moving up, especially for anyone recruiting full-time workers, 81% of whom have access.

The survey also shows why leave goes unused. In an average month, 8% of workers needed leave but did not take it. The most common reason was too much work, cited by 29% of them, followed by fear of consequences or denial at 14% and being unable to afford the lost income at 13%. For an owner, the first of those is a staffing problem as much as a benefits one: a paid day nobody feels able to take does not do much for retention.

In an average week, 21% of workers took some leave, averaging 14.4 hours, and 69% of those who took leave used only paid leave.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Economics Daily and Access to and Use of Leave release; business counts are from our own database of independent U.S. businesses. This is general information, not legal or HR advice; paid leave rules vary by state and city.