Vacation accrual is based off hours worked. Credit 100 hours and you'll earn about 5 hours of vacation time. The accrual rates vary with years of service. We bid for vacation quarterly. Currently we are bidding for June thru August. The bid for September thru November won't occur until July. Vacation is paid out at a rate between 2.5 and 4.2 hours per day. (reserves must use 4.2 hours). If you are awarded a week, you can cancel days you don't want. Let's say you only want 5 days of the award. You can then assign a daily vacation rate between 2.5 and 4.2. You'd use between 12.5 and 21 hours of vacation time. Those hours would be factored into your PBS bid for the month. Transfer domiciles, upgrade, or transition, and you lose your awarded vacation. You also can't take any vacation until after 12 months. It may not even start accruing until after 6. Unless you are senior in your domicile, you can forget about vacation over the summer or holidays. We have nowhere near enough vacation slots for the amount of vacation time accrued.

Looking at the seniority list, the amount of DEC hired over the past year is shockingly low. I figured the number would be much higher.