How It Works

Holiday Optimizer uses dynamic programming to find smart ways to distribute your PTO days across the year. By cleverly combining your PTO with weekends, holidays, and company shutdowns, it creates longer breaks while using fewer vacation days.

You can do this by hand in five steps — or let the optimizer do it for you. The method is the same one the tool automates:

1. 1

   Map your public holidays

   Write down every public holiday for 2026 in your country (and your state or province), and note which weekday each one falls on. Mid-week holidays and holidays next to a weekend are the most valuable.

2. 2

   Find the bridge days

   Look at the working days sitting between each holiday and the nearest weekend. These "bridge" days are your highest-value PTO targets, because a few of them connect a holiday and a weekend into one long run.

3. 3

   Stack your PTO on the bridges

   Request the bridge days off so a single holiday stretches into a long break. For example, taking the four working days around a mid-week public holiday turns it into nine consecutive days off.

4. 4

   Prioritize the biggest breaks first

   Spend your limited PTO on the holidays that produce the longest breaks first — the Christmas-to-New-Year stretch and any mid-week holidays — then fill in the rest with long weekends.

5. 5

   Add company days and confirm the plan

   Layer in company shutdowns and any pre-booked days, then run the Holiday Optimizer to confirm the arrangement that gives you the most consecutive days off for the PTO you have.

Prefer it done for you? Run the optimizer or browse the 2026 PTO calendar.

Each strategy has different rules for break spacing and length. The algorithm enforces these constraints while finding arrangements that maximize your consecutive time off.