Employee notices she takes less PTO after her company adopted an unlimited PTO policy: 'In 2022, I took 13 PTO days. Last year with unlimited, I took 8.'

That's how they get you.

Unlimited PTO sounds like a great deal. Who wouldn't want to have to think twice about requesting a day off work after having a little too much fun on a Wednesday night? You wouldn't have to forego taking days off to "save up" time for a big vacation. You could feel confident about not working on the days between Christmas and New Year's Day. In short, you would be free!

The problem is, unlimited PTO rarely, if ever, works this way. It usually works one of two ways.

The people in charge of approving PTO requests constantly reject employees' requests without reason, discouraging them from asking in the first place.
The employees fear abusing the policy and taking "too much" time off, so they request far less time off than they would if they had a set number of PTO hours.

There are always people who will take a policy "too far" and request more than 6 weeks off a year, but such cases are rare.

One of the worst parts about unlimited PTO is that the company cannot pay you for your unused time off when you quit or are laid off. If you have 100 hours of unused PTO, your job is supposed to pay you for that time when you leave the company, and they can't pay you for an unlimited number of days off. If you have that policy, you should enjoy it while you have it, because you don't get anything in return for saving your PTO up.

via Rafael Cisneros Méndez

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The employee in this story noticed that she was taking less time off this year than she did three years ago because of her company's unlimited PTO policy.
My company switched to "unlimited PTO" two years ago, and I realized I took less vacation than when we had the 15 day cap

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