Glossary
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Wellness days — also called recharge days, reset days, or mental health days — are paid days off given for rest, on top of the normal vacation allowance and not deducted from it. The names are used loosely and often interchangeably, which hides the one design decision that determines whether they work. That decision is whether everybody takes the day at the same time.
Check out Vacation Tracker’s recharge feature and detect burnout signals early.
Synchronisation is the whole point
A wellness day handed to individuals is a duvet day with a better name. It inherits the same problem: the work still waits, and a colleague still covers.
That matters because it’s precisely what stops people from taking leave. Pew found that among US workers who use less paid time off than they’re offered, 49% worry about falling behind and 43% feel bad about colleagues picking up the extra work. An individual wellness day solves neither.
A company-wide recharge day solves both at once. Nobody is working, so nothing accumulates, and nobody covers. The permission is structural rather than cultural — you don’t have to ask, judge whether it’s reasonable, or wonder what your manager thinks.
Research points the same way. Hartig and colleagues, studying antidepressant dispensing against vacation patterns across a national population, described “collective restoration” — benefit rises as more people take time off simultaneously, and concentrated time off produces more population benefit than the same days spread thinly. Rest works better when the people around you are resting too.
Where it came from, and what happened to Nike’s
The practice took off in 2021. Nike closed its head office for a week that August and told staff to “destress”; Bumble went fully offline for a week in June; LinkedIn, Mozilla and others ran similar shutdowns. The driver was pandemic-era burnout, and the fact that normal vacation had stopped working when there was nowhere to go.
Then the honest part. In November 2025, Nike scrapped Wellness Week. Its chief people officer told staff conditions were “very different” from a few years ago, and the company needed to “get back to winning,” against a backdrop of restructuring.
Worth sitting with. The flagship example lasted about four years and was withdrawn when trading conditions changed. Recharge days are discretionary, and discretionary benefits are the first thing cut — an argument for treating them as a supplement to properly resourced leave, never a replacement.
Designing one that works
- Pick a date and close. The synchronised version is the one with a mechanism behind it
- Don’t deduct it from the vacation allowance. A wellness day taken from existing PTO is a rebrand, not a benefit
- Cover the people who can’t take it. Support and client-facing teams need a designated alternative day, booked in advance, or the perk lands as visible inequity
- Say what “closed” means — no meetings, no email expectation, no “quick question.” A day off that still pings is worse than a working one
- Attach it to a long weekend or a quiet period, so it’s restful rather than a mid-sprint interruption
- Record it as its own leave type, so it doesn’t distort vacation utilisation figures
- Don’t offer it instead of fixing workload. A day of rest against chronic overload reads as exactly that
Read more on our blog: Vacation Tracker Recharge: Know When to Take Time Off
What it isn’t
Not a duvet day — that’s individual, unscheduled and taken at no notice.
Not a company shutdown — shutdowns are usually operational or seasonal, and frequently charged against employees’ own leave. A recharge day is additional by definition.
Not sick leave. If someone is unwell, that’s sick leave, with its own pay and reporting rules. A wellness day shouldn’t be used to absorb genuine illness — doing so hides it from your absence data.
Frequently asked questions
What is a wellness day? A paid day off for rest, given in addition to normal vacation and not deducted from it.
Are wellness days a legal requirement? No — a voluntary employer benefit in every jurisdiction.
Company-wide or individual? Company-wide, where the business can manage it. The synchronised version removes the backlog and the guilt; the individual version removes neither.
How many should we give? Most employers offering them run one to five days a year, often a single scheduled day each quarter.
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