Why fintech company Bolt eliminated its unlimited time off policy

Love it or hate it, everyone in HR has an opinion on unlimited paid time off.

Just 7% of US companies offer unlimited PTO, the Wall Street Journal reported. And 30% of private employers that don’t, instead offer their employees an average of 10–14 PTO days a year after one year on the job, according to 2024 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employees with unlimited PTO take an average of 16 days off annually, a 2024 SHRM survey found, while those afforded a specific number of days take an average of 14.

Some HR pros have said that unlimited PTO policies can be vague, which can lead to over and underutilization of the benefit. The latter can lead to higher rates of employee burnout.

That was the case at Bolt. Its CEO, Ryan Breslow, posted on LinkedIn in July that the fintech company “killed unlimited PTO” because “it’s totally broken.”

“We looked at the data really on how often people were taking time off internally,” Kelly Lawson Pihl, Bolt’s head of people operations, told HR Brew. “[It] skewed towards higher performers were not taking enough time off, and others maybe took a little bit more advantage of that ambiguity.”

The move away from unlimited. Bolt’s unlimited PTO policy dates back to its founding in 2014 and was the norm for its remote workforce of about 130 full-time employees in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa until July. Its new policy grants all global employees a specific amount of PTO annually. Bolt’s roughly 80 US-based employees, for example, get 20 PTO days. (PTO taken prior to the policy change will not be counted toward the 20 days this year, Lawson Pihl said.)

Lawson Pihl said she wanted to address the “high discrepancy” between employees taking too much and too little time off. Under the unlimited policy, she said some employees, especially high performers, were taking as little as one or two days off per year, while others were taking more than 20 days.

“There’s too much confusion on how to utilize this unlimited policy. I think it sounds really progressive and good on paper, but in practice, again, it created this imbalance, created this discrepancy, and then confusion,” she said.

In switching to a traditional PTO policy, Lawson Pihl said she hopes more employees will feel empowered to take time to relax and recharge, especially high-performing employees, who may be more prone to burnout.

“To provide that clarity really gave people the ability to say, ‘Okay, I have this. I know it’s expected, and I know that I should be taking this off,’” she said. “‘In fact, my team, my managers, leaders, people ops, really expects it. It’s not just ambiguous and there.’”

Advice for other HR pros. Different countries have different cultural expectations when it comes to time off, Lawson Pihl said. US employees, for example, tend to take less time off than their counterparts in other Western countries. People leaders can help encourage them to take more time by setting a standard for the “sacredness” of days off, she said.

“[Make] sure that managers discuss with their team a clear point of contact when that person is off, to not ‘at’ them or ping them in Slack messages, if at all possible, and to do schedule sends for when they’re back on,” she said. “Those day-to-day tactical things that managers and team members can do to help make this more of an actual time that people can unplug.”

HR leaders reevaluating their PTO policy should solicit employee feedback on what is and isn’t working so they can make a data-driven decision, Lawson Pihl advised.

“Figure out the problem that you’re trying to solve first and then work backwards from there,” she said. “Give folks the resources and tools to be able to understand and utilize fully whatever policy you go with.”