Expats, tell me about home leave

[Leah]

I work for a small NGO, am based abroad, and my organization is now looking to put together a policy for home leave. I'm trying to gather information from expats about what your home leave policy looks like. Can you please tell me:

• How many days of home leave do you get? Does that include travel days/how are travel days handled?
• When does someone qualify for home leave (e.g. after 1 year of service abroad)?
• How frequent is the home leave (e.g. annual)?
• Any other conditions to home leave (e.g. the employee must work for one more year following home leave)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[LCD]

For non-hardship posts:

7 days of home leave per annum, plus travel time if you're more than an eight hour flight from home

Qualification at 12 months of service (give or take a couple of weeks with manager's OK)

Home leave only applies when the employee has 3 months + left on their contract

$250 for incidentals (I think per person up to a max of $750) for each home leave period

Hotels covered for forced stopovers there and back

For hardship posts it depends, but generally the same conditions but  every six months.

[Andrea Dekrout]

In my last post in PNG we got “out of country” leave every 6 months (3 times in a two year post). That is, we did not have to go back to our home country, but, we were obliged to leave our post country to receive the leave entitlement, which was equivalent to the cost of a flight home. The leave we took came out of our annual leave. Everyone was pretty happy with that.

Now I work for a small NGO in Botswana and we get no home leave or travel assistance at all. In my opinion, not having home leave makes it harder to keep good international staff, while having it can go a long way to compensating for a less than stellar base wage.