A senior Meta employee’s recent post about the company’s sabbatical policy has put a spotlight on one of the more unusual perks in big tech. David Woodland, who works on Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta Glasses, shared on X that he had just returned from what Meta internally calls a “Recharge,” a fully paid, month-long break that employees become eligible for once every five years.
Woodland, who has been at the company for over six years, wrote that he had been trying to remember the last time he went a full month without working, and landed on the summer after sixth grade, more than 25 years ago. He called the break the best perk he has ever received, and said he was now back to building, with what he described as a lot in the pipeline.
The policy itself is not new. Meta has offered the Recharge benefit for years as a way to reward long-tenured employees, but posts like Woodland’s tend to resurface it in public conversation, especially at a company that has spent the last couple of years better known for layoffs than for perks. Meta cut around 8,000 jobs earlier this year as part of a broader push to redirect spending toward AI, and the mood inside the company has, by most accounts, been far from celebratory. A benefit like Recharge stands out partly because it is a reminder that some of the older, employee-friendly parts of Meta’s culture are still intact.
According to details shared separately by another former Meta employee who wrote about the policy, the sabbatical works out to 30 calendar days of paid time off, and employees can stack an additional 10 days of regular PTO on top of it, stretching the break to 44 days. Depending on how public holidays line up, some employees have managed to squeeze out even more time away from work without touching their annual leave balance at all.
Eligibility resets every five years, so an employee’s second Recharge would come around their tenth anniversary, the third around their fifteenth, and so on. It is fully paid, meaning there is no dip in salary during the time off, and employees are not expected to be reachable for work during the break. For a company with a workforce that includes a large number of long-tenured engineers, designers and product leads, particularly in departments like Reality Labs where Woodland works, the benefit has become something of a badge of tenure inside the company.
Not everyone experiences the Recharge the same way, though. Some employees who have written about taking their own sabbaticals have described it as genuinely difficult to switch off after years of being constantly plugged in, particularly for people who have built their identity around their jobs. A month off sounds simple on paper, but for someone who has not taken an extended break in a decade or more, actually disconnecting can take real effort.
Meta’s benefits package more broadly is considered generous by industry standards, and includes things like unlimited sick time, a wellness reimbursement that can be used for anything from therapy to childcare, and heavily subsidised health coverage. The Recharge sits alongside these as one of the more distinctive offerings, less common at rival companies, where sabbaticals, if they exist at all, tend to be shorter or unpaid.
For now, Woodland’s post has done what these things usually do on X, reminding the industry that Meta still has some of the better long-tenure perks in big tech, even as it continues to lay off employees and reorganise teams around its AI push.