The best-paid workers in the US not only make more money than many of their colleagues, they also tend to get more paid vacation days.

An annual survey of employee benefits conducted by the US government shows that, in 2017, nearly half of the people in the top 25% of earners received at least 10 days of paid vacation. The bottom 25% was not so lucky—only around a tenth of them received such generous leave.

Paid vacation time is often overlooked (pdf) in measures of pay inequality in the US, because the value of time off does not appear in the household income statistics. But it is yet another factor contributing to the large and persistent disparity between the lives of the poor and rich in America.