🇫🇷 France · 🇦🇺 Australia
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
France treats leave as a civic right. Australia treats it as an entitlement — one that an alarming number of its workers promptly hoard rather than use. The gap between policy and practice in both countries tells you more about workplace culture than any statutory table, and the gap between France's five weeks and Australia's four conceals a larger divergence in what "time off" is actually understood to mean.
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Expect five weeks of paid leave plus 11 public holidays as a baseline — this is statutory, not a perk | Try to schedule a client meeting or product launch for August; the country is broadly unavailable and unashamed about it |
| Understand RTT (Réduction du Temps de Travail) — if you work more than 35 hours per week, you accrue extra days off; track them actively | Eat lunch at your desk — it is culturally frowned upon and, for certain categories of workers, technically prohibited |
| Plan your summer leave in advance and declare it formally; "juilletiste" or "aoûtiste" — July or August — is often a family tradition, not a casual decision | Book critical vendor, legal, or government appointments for August; closures cascade across sectors |
| Use all of your leave — the French cultural norm is to take it; not taking it signals something has gone wrong | Expect French colleagues to respond to work messages during their leave; the "right to disconnect" is enshrined in law |
| Build relationships over the long lunch — the midday meal is the primary site of social bonding in French workplaces | Discuss salary or personal achievements during a first lunch; it's a relationship meal, not a performance review |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Know your entitlement: four weeks of paid annual leave under the National Employment Standards, with an additional week for shift workers | Let annual leave accumulate beyond eight weeks — employers can direct you to take leave once it reaches that threshold |
| Understand that the "long service leave" entitlement — typically an additional 6–13 weeks after 7–10 years of service, depending on state — is real and substantial | Assume your employer will prompt you to take leave; in Australian workplaces, using your entitlement is largely your own responsibility to manage |
| Book Christmas and Easter well in advance — these are peak periods and popular leave windows | Try to take leave without reasonable notice during busy periods; approval is not automatic |
| Understand "cashing out" leave provisions — up to two weeks per year can be paid out rather than taken, with agreement | Neglect your leave balance; burnout from excessive leave accumulation is a documented pattern, not an exaggeration |
| Use leave loading (typically 17.5% on top of base pay during annual leave) — it applies to most award-covered workers and adds up | Confuse annual leave with personal/carer's leave — the latter is a separate 10-day entitlement and should not be conflated |
France's statutory leave entitlement is one of the more generous in the OECD: 25 working days (five weeks) of paid annual leave, plus 11 public holidays, plus any additional RTT days accrued through working beyond the 35-hour threshold. Employees who regularly work 37–39 hours per week typically accumulate between 9 and 15 extra days off per year through RTT alone. The arithmetic of French leave culture is not complicated: most professional workers can expect six to eight weeks of effective time off per year.
What makes France's approach distinctive is not the quantity but the cultural infrastructure around its use. August is not merely a popular holiday month; it is a national institution. The grandes vacances — the grand holidays — see millions of French workers take two to three consecutive weeks in July or August, with family tradition often dictating which. Bakeries, law offices, family restaurants, and medical practices close for the month. The concept of apologising for being on leave does not really exist. The "right to disconnect" (droit à la déconnexion), codified in French law since 2017 for companies with more than 50 employees, formalises what was already cultural practice: that a person on holiday is, by definition, unavailable.
Australia's National Employment Standards guarantee four weeks of paid annual leave for full-time and part-time employees, with an additional week for shift workers. These are minimum floors, not averages; many enterprise agreements and industry awards provide more. On paper, Australia's position in the OECD is solid. In practice, the situation is more complicated.
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A 2024 survey of over 1,000 Australian workers found that employees had accrued a collective 160 million days of untaken annual leave, according to research published by The Conversation. More than one in five workers (22%) had more than four weeks banked, with older workers holding the largest balances. Researchers linked this leave hoarding directly to burnout: nearly half of Australian workers reported feeling burned out at the time of the survey. There is an evident irony in a workforce that has accumulated half a year's worth of unspent rest and is simultaneously exhausted.
The structural reasons are familiar across many Anglophone countries: implicit cultural pressure not to be absent, the sense that leave creates extra work on return, and managers who set the tone by visibly not taking their own. Australia has attempted to address the accumulation problem through an "excessive leave" provision in the Fair Work Act, allowing employers to direct workers to take leave once it exceeds eight weeks, but the provision is neither widely used nor widely known.
The contrast between France and Australia is not really about the number of days — it's about the cultural relationship with rest. France has built a social consensus around leave that makes not taking it unusual, even faintly suspicious. Australia has the statutory architecture but has struggled to build the cultural permission to use it, with a substantial portion of its workforce treating annual leave as a reserve rather than a rhythm.
Hofstede's data on power distance is suggestive here: France scores 68 versus Australia's 36, meaning French workplaces carry more formal hierarchy — but that hierarchy, paradoxically, enforces the norm of taking leave rather than undermining it. Australian workplaces, with their flatter structures and "mate" culture, apply peer pressure in the opposite direction: people take their cues from their colleagues, and when colleagues don't take leave, neither do you. Uncertainty avoidance also differs markedly (France 86, Australia 51), which may explain why French workers follow leave rules precisely, while Australian workers interpret them more casually — often to their own detriment.
frenchentree.com — An expat who moved from Sydney to Lyon for a marketing role described being mid-project in late July when her entire French team simultaneously went on leave for three weeks. No handover meeting, no coverage arrangement. The project simply paused. Her first instinct was to escalate; her French manager's response, from a beach in Brittany, was that the client also understood — because the client's team had also gone on holiday.
Quora — An Australian professional who spent two years at a Paris tech firm noted that the most surprising aspect was not the volume of leave but the complete absence of guilt around it. In Australia, taking a full week off prompts a minor social negotiation and a flurry of pre-departure emails. In France, you notify your manager, set an out-of-office, and disappear. The expectation that you will be unreachable is treated as normal and appropriate.
Internations Paris — A British expat working in a French multinational described being reprimanded, gently but clearly, for eating a sandwich at her desk during a busy period. The lunch break, she was informed, was not optional for her colleagues — it was a boundary that the team protected collectively, and her visible disregard for it was read as either rudeness or desperation.
theconversation.com — A study of Australian workers published in 2024 found that employees with the largest accrued leave balances were consistently among the highest-performing and most senior staff — a pattern suggesting that the very people most in need of rest are the ones least likely to take it, partly because their absence is noticed and partly because they identify sufficiently with their work to find it difficult to leave.
If you are moving from Australia to France, adjust your expectations about August upward and your expectations about after-hours availability downward. If you are moving from France to Australia, use your leave — not because you must, but because the 160 million days of banked rest prove that you probably won't without conscious effort.
The real difference is this: France has decided that rest is a collective responsibility, while Australia has decided it is a personal choice. One approach results in a nation that disappears in August. The other results in a workforce that is burned out and sitting on six months of unused holiday.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.