Leave entitlements are usually consistent across industries

In many countries, workers have a legal right to a certain amount of paid time off per year. This is typically consistent across occupations. For example:

In Australia, all full-time employees receive 4 weeks of paid annual leave each year, in addition to public holidays (source).
In the UK, all full-time employees receive at least 5.6 weeks of statutory annual leave, which includes public holidays (source).
The United States, of course, has no federal law governing annual leave, though there are some state level laws (source). On average, American employers offer 2 weeks of annual leave per year (source).

(The above list should be caveated by the fact that many employers offer more than the legal minimum amount of leave, and many industries have specific labour agreements that may also involve additional annual leave.)

So, in general, annual leave is constant across different professions.

Emotional stress is consistently different across industries

However, some jobs simply require more time off than other jobs. Alice might work in a job where she works her 8-hour day, goes home to relax and sleep, and wakes up feeling refreshed and ready for the next day. Bob, in contrast, might work in a job where he works his 8-hour day, goes home to relax and sleep, but wakes up still distressed or fatigued from the previous day’s work. This is very common in caring professions, and it has its own name: secondary traumatic stress and/or compassion fatigue. (These terms are defined differently depending on the source, but both generally refer to similar concepts of taking on an additional emotional burden from certain caring professions.)

Of course, there are many individual and environmental factors that affect this. But there are also trends across industries. Some jobs, on average, are simply more emotionally burdensome than others.

Ondrejková and Halamová 2022 (Prevalence of compassion fatigue among helping professions and relationship to compassion for others, self-compassion and self- criticism) report rates of burnout from a survey of several hundred professionals from different fields. The authors measured secondary traumatic stress and burnout (among other characteristics) using the Professional Quality of Life Scale.

Here is the mean level of secondary traumatic stress and burnout by occupation, as reported in that study. Higher numbers indicate greater stress or burnout.

Home nurses: 26.15 / 23.07
Pedagogues (teachers): 25.33 / 24.33
Doctors: 25.13 / 26.95
Nurses: 24.91 / 23.91
Priests and pastors: 23.56 / 21.12
Psychologists: 21.92 / 23.22
Social workers: 21.84 / 22.81
Paramedics: 21.33 / 21.80
Police officers: 21.63 / 22.48
Psychotherapists and coaches: 19.25 / 18.85

What would an optimal annual leave policy look like?

Professions with higher rates of secondary traumatic stress should, in my opinion, offer more annual leave throughout the year. Secondary traumatic stress and burnout are complicated psychological and occupational phenomena; not every case of secondary traumatic stress will be easily solved through more time off. The academic literature contains more nuance about different policy solutions to this common occupational challenge. But honouring the additional emotional burden in many caring roles would rarely hurt - it would be a big step in the right direction.

I found this excellent tidbit. Consider Armenia. According to Wikipedia, Armenia actually accounts for emotional strain in its annual leave laws: “Generally, the duration of annual leave is 20 working days. Extended annual leave up to 25 working days is granted to certain categories of employees whose work involves great nervous, emotional and intellectual strain and professional risk.”

Perhaps other countries should take a leaf from Armenia’s book?