Holiday Profile – Thanksgiving Day

November 2018

The National Compensation Survey¹ (NCS) captures the provisions and costs of employer-provided benefits in private industry and state and local government, including leave benefits such as vacation, sick leave, and holidays. In a series of holiday profiles, BLS is publishing new data on the incidence of federal and other prominent holidays. Thanksgiving Day is observed on the fourth Thursday of November.

Over 3 in 4 civilian workers² (77 percent) received paid holidays in March 2018.³ Paid holidays cost employers an average of 77 cents per employee hour worked.⁴ Among civilian workers who received paid holidays, 97 percent received Thanksgiving Day as a paid holiday, with 97 percent of private industry workers and 99 percent of state and local government workers receiving the holiday. (See Table 1.)

Table 1. Percent of workers receiving the Thanksgiving Day paid holiday, March 2018
(All workers with paid holidays = 100 percent)
Characteristics	Civilian		Private industry		State and local government
Characteristics	Percent	Standard Error	Percent	Standard Error	Percent	Standard Error
All workers	97	0.5	97	0.6	99	0.5
Occupational group:
Management, business, and financial	99	0.5	99	0.6	99	0.4
Professional and related	99	0.5	99	0.6	99	0.4
Service	91	1.8	90	2.0	98	1.7
Sales and office	96	0.8	96	0.8	99	0.4
Natural resources, construction, and maintenance	98	0.5	98	0.5	100	0.2
Production, transportation, and material moving	98	0.8	98	0.8	100	0.3
Bargaining status (1):
Union	99	0.7	99	0.9	99	0.6
Nonunion	97	0.6	96	0.6	99	0.6
Establishments size
1-99 workers	96	0.6	96	0.6	99	0.5
100 workers or more	98	0.6	98	0.7	99	0.7
Census region (1):
Northeast	98	1.2	98	1.3	99	0.4
South	96	1.0	95	1.1	99	0.2
Midwest	98	0.7	98	0.7	98	0.9
West	97	1.1	96	1.2	98	1.9
Footnotes: (1) For more information on bargaining status and census region definitions, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Methods, National Compensation Measures, www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ncs/concepts.htm.

More highlights of Thanksgiving Day paid holiday benefits include:

The incidence ranged from 99 percent of civilian workers in management, business, and financial and professional and related occupations to 91 percent in service occupations.
Union workers (99 percent) were more likely than nonunion workers (97 percent) to receive the paid holiday.
Ninety-eight percent of private industry workers in the Northeast and Midwest regions received the paid holiday, compared with 95 percent in the South.
Nearly all state and local government workers (99 percent) received the paid holiday.

Estimation Methods for Specific Paid Holidays

The estimates of specific paid holiday percentages for this profile are based on information field economists collected for sample establishments. Missing data were not subject to standard imputation procedures used in other NCS publications. Workers were included as having paid holiday leave for either partial or full workday paid holidays. Data are rounded to the nearest whole number. Use caution in applying these estimates because they are only based on collected data, part of the overall sample, and not subject to standard imputation and processing methods. Those methods can affect estimates based on establishment and worker characteristics of available and missing holiday information.⁵

Standard errors are based only on collected holiday information. (See Table 1.) Data that satisfied relative standard error criteria for collected and matched holiday collection information were used in this profile.

Additional Holidays Data

Upcoming paid holiday benefit profiles in 2018 will be available at www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/holiday_profiles.htm.

In addition to the paid holidays data in this profile, BLS also publishes the average number of paid holidays offered. Civilian workers² received an average of 8 paid holidays per year with approximately one-third of all workers (33 percent) receiving 10 or more paid holidays per year. Private industry workers averaged 8 paid holidays per year and state and local government workers averaged 11 paid holidays per year. For more information, see www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2018/benefits_leave.htm.

END NOTES

⁽¹⁾ The National Compensation Survey (NCS) collects information on employee wages and salaries and benefits from a nationally representative sample of about 8,000 responding establishments. (See March 2018 Appendix 1). The NCS program produces the Employment Cost Index (ECI) and Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC). The ECI tracks changes over time in average employer costs for pay and benefits, while the ECEC expresses average employer costs for pay and benefits in dollars and cents. The NCS also tracks coverage and provisions of employer-sponsored benefits such as healthcare, retirement, and leave benefits. For more information, see www.bls.gov/ncs.

⁽²⁾ Civilian workers includes both private industry and state and local government workers.

⁽³⁾ Bureau of Labor Statistics: National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2018, www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2018.

⁽⁴⁾ Bureau of Labor Statistics: National Compensation Survey: Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2018, www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ecec_06082018.pdf.

⁽⁵⁾ Bureau of Labor Statistics: Handbook of Methods, National Compensation Measures, www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ncs/home.htm.

Last Modified Date: November 16, 2018