It struck me that "unlimited vacation days" also seems like a way to make sure that when people quit, you don't have to pay out a vacation dump. And if you hav

It struck me that "unlimited vacation days" also seems like a way to make sure that when people quit, you don't have to pay out a vacation dump. And if you have a team of workaholics who never take time off, then those payouts could get big. I worked for a company whose policy was to cap vacation payouts when people left. The employee handbook stated that you'd be paid a maximum of 40 hours vacation unless state law at your work location said otherwise. If you had more than 5 days vacation in your bucket, well, tough luck. Luckily I lived/worked in IL at the time I quit that job, and IL forbids this. When researching that, I noticed there's a disparity among states in terms of how vacation time is treated. Some states treat accrued vacation time as earned compensation that just hasn't yet been paid, and must be paid on termination. Other states treat vacation time as an agreement that you just don't have to come into work and you'll still get paid, and the employer is free to pay out vacation accruals however they like (or not at all). It seems like by providing no defined accruals of vacation time, you step around the whole "earned yet unpaid compensation" and turn time off into an agreement that you won't come in and they will still pay you.