We build tools to help people actually use their PTO.

Most workers leave 5+ paid days on the table every year. Not because they don't want them — because the calendar is harder to optimize than it looks, and because the social cost of asking is bigger than it should be. Leavewise exists because the tooling for this problem was bad and the writing about it was generic.

What we believe

  • Time off is part of compensation.Unused PTO isn't employer generosity — it's payment you didn't collect.
  • Calendars are unfair. Two people with the same 25 days off can have wildly different lived experiences depending on how their national holidays line up. We try to surface the gap so the underdog year can be planned around.
  • Specific beats vague.“Take more vacation” is useless. “Take Friday Aug 14 and Monday Aug 17 off, and you have a 9-day window” is a plan.
  • Travel content should be honest about cost. If a destination is good in October because it's shoulder season, we say that. If a “cheap” flight isn't actually cheap once you add the airport transfer, we say that too — we even built a calculator for it.

What we make

Leavewise is split into a few surfaces, each tied to a question someone is actually asking:

  • The optimizer — for “how do I get the most days off out of the PTO I have?”
  • Bridge-day finder — for “what long weekends are hiding in this year’s calendar?”
  • Holiday browser — for “what are the official public holidays in [country] in [year]?”
  • Country comparison — for “does my country actually give less PTO than the next one?”
  • Calculators — for the small, sharp questions: how much your unused PTO is worth, when a cheaper flight stops being cheaper, etc.
  • The blog — for context on policy, country-specific rules, life events that interact with leave, and the longer-form “here's how to think about this” pieces.
  • Glossary — plain-English definitions of bridge day, anchor window, accrual, use-it-or-lose-it, and the rest of the working vocabulary.

Who runs Leavewise

Leavewise is a small operation. The tools, calculators, and core writing are run by the founding team out of Seoul. We work in English and Korean, in part because most global tools in this space ignore the Korean labor calendar entirely — substitute holidays, sandwich days, the way Lunar New Year and Chuseok actually compress real schedules.

For deeper context on how we source data, fact-check posts on regulated topics, and handle corrections, see our methodology page.

How we make money

The core tools and the blog are free. We make money in two ways, in roughly this order:

  • Leavewise for Teams. A B2B version for HR and People teams that need to plan collective coverage. See /team.
  • Sponsored content (rare).If a piece is sponsored, it says so at the top in plain language. We don't do affiliate-laundered advertorials.

Press & contact

For corrections, partnership questions, B2B trials, or press inquiries, email hello@leavewise.co.

Journalists writing about PTO use, leave policy, or holiday calendars are welcome to cite our calculators and country pages directly. If you want a custom data pull (for example, “the bridge days in 2027 that produce the longest break for the least PTO across G7 countries”), we can usually run that and turn it around the same week.

Want to see the tools in action?

The optimizer is the fastest place to start.

Open the optimizer