Unlimited holiday sounds generous. The missing number is the problem.

Unlimited holiday sounds like the most generous thing an employer can offer. No allowance, no carry over arguments, no counting days. Take what you need.

Then ask anyone on such a scheme how much leave they took last year, and watch them hesitate.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A fixed allowance is a number somebody gave you, and leaving it unused feels like waste. An unlimited scheme replaces that number with a judgement about whether you have earned time off, and nobody wants to be the person who judged themselves generously. The decision moves from the calendar to your conscience, and your conscience has met your workload.

It also removes the only benchmark you had. With twenty five days you know where you stand, and so does everyone else. With unlimited, the honest answer to how much leave you get is however much your manager tolerates, and you will not find that number written anywhere.

One thing worth being precise about, because it is often muddled. In the UK you have a statutory minimum of 5.6 weeks, and no policy can contract out of it. If you leave with statutory leave accrued and untaken, you are entitled to be paid for it, unlimited scheme or not. What these schemes may remove is any contractual balance above that minimum, so the payout you might once have expected shrinks towards the statutory floor. That is a narrower change than "you lose your holiday pay", and it is still a change worth noticing. The statutory position is set out in the government guidance on holiday entitlement at gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights.

There is a number that would settle it: the average leave taken before the policy changed, and the average now. A scheme designed to give people more time off is a scheme somebody is measuring. If nobody is measuring, the policy is decoration.

The useful question is not whether the policy is called unlimited. It is whether people actually take more time off. If the company cannot tell you that, the missing number tells you something of its own.