How's the vacation policy at FDA?

FDA offers the same vacation policy as all other Federal agencies. You can view this policy at the OPM website (https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-administration/#url=Overview). Essentially, during your first 3 years of service with the Federal government, you receive 4 hours of sick leave and 4 hours of annual (vacation) leave per bi-weekly pay period. That's a total of 104 hours of sick and vacation leave per year. After 3 years of service, you move up to 6 hours of vacation leave per pay period (sick leave always remains at 4 hours per pay period regardless of service length). After 15 years of service, you move up to 8 hours of vacation leave per pay period. You can use your annual leave as you see fit but you can carry over no more than 120 hours from one leave year to another (we call this "use or lose"). You can bank your sick leave as much as you like throughout your career, and in fact you probably should, because when you retire, your unused sick leave

... can be credited toward a higher pension payout. You can donate annual leave to those in need who are suffering hardship and are on the leave donation list. Sadly, you can't donate sick leave, which is really unfortunate, since that's the leave you could afford to part with. You also get all Federal holidays off, which I think totals 13, so that's 13 days in addition to the 104 hours of leave. Pretty generous overall. When I worked in private sector, I got 6.6 hours of PTO per pay period. It seemed generous until I got sick and realized I was burning through my vacation by taking a sick day. It's nice to have the dedicated sick leave!