Vacation Optimizer

Calculate, using your available vacation days, which dates to request to maximize your time off — combining weekends, national and regional holidays, and any custom holidays you add.

Combines one long break with some of the best remaining bridge days.

Best for: a balance between a long trip and several short breaks.

≈ Heuristic strategy

How the algorithm works

A day is non-working if it's outside your weekly work pattern, or is an official holiday, or is a custom holiday. Requesting a vacation day only consumes budget if that day would otherwise be a workday. "Longest continuous block" uses a sliding window that finds the mathematically longest possible period for your budget (exact optimum); "Maximum total rest" allocates the budget across multiple non-overlapping periods using dynamic programming (also exact within the model of merging consecutive weekends/holidays); "Balanced strategy" is an explicit heuristic combining both approaches.

What efficiency means

A period's efficiency is the total number of free days (including weekends and holidays you already had for free) divided by the vacation days you actually spend to get that whole period — that's why a single day requested next to a holiday and a weekend can yield an efficiency of 4x or more.

Privacy

All calculations run in your browser. We never send your dates, location or vacation plan to any server.

Frequently asked questions

Related calculators

We use analytics cookies to understand which calculators are useful. They are never used for advertising. More information in our privacy policy.