Do People Still Get Holiday Bonuses?

I was watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and it got me thinking.

Dec 22, 2025

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I have a fairly short list of holiday traditions. One of them is rewatching Christmas Vacation sometime in mid-December. I know all the beats. I know the rant is coming. I know how it ends. I love it every single time I watch it.

But this year, an early scene in the movie gave me pause. Clark Griswold mentions how excited he is for his holiday bonus, and starts talking about how he has already allocated it toward a new pool for his family.

Of course Clark gets a bonus. Of course it’s big. Of course it shows up right before Christmas. The entire movie carries that assumption along, and we’re never really expected to question it.

But this time, I did. Sort of.

Bonuses themselves aren’t unusual. Plenty of people receive bonuses tied to performance, sales, or company profits. When I was a teenager, I vaguely remember a small year-end gift from my first employer. It certainly wasn’t anything that looked like a thirteenth paycheck wrapped in holiday cheer.

What stood out to me in Christmas Vacation wasn’t the bonus. It was the type of bonus.

So I paused the movie and asked a simple question: How common are holiday bonuses, really? It turns out the answer has a very economic explanation.

Why Firms Use Bonuses (and Why Holiday Bonuses Are Different)

Before talking specifically about holiday bonuses, it helps to zoom out and ask why firms use bonuses at all.

From a company’s perspective, bonuses solve a problem that wages don’t. Wages are sticky. Once they go up, they’re hard to reduce without layoffs or resentment. Bonuses, by contrast, are more flexible. Firms can reward workers in good years and scale back in bad ones. Economists would say bonuses allow firms to adjust compensation without locking in higher fixed costs.

That logic fits neatly with production bonuses. Those are tied to output, sales, or measurable goals. Work harder, hit a target, increase revenue, and get paid more. The incentive is clear, and the connection between effort and reward is explicit.

Holiday and end-of-year bonuses don’t work that way.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics groups them into what it calls nonproduction bonuses. End-of-year bonuses are payments meant to show appreciation for working hard throughout the year. Holiday bonuses are similar, but even less tied to performance. They’re often token gestures, with everyone receiving the same amount regardless of role, output, or results.

That distinction matters. These bonuses aren’t designed to change behavior at the margin. They don’t reward extra effort or higher productivity. Instead, they’re about morale, goodwill, and retention.

What makes holiday bonuses appealing also makes them risky. Once a nonproduction bonus becomes routine, employees stop treating it as a bonus and start treating it as income. At that point, the firm loses the flexibility that made the bonus attractive in the first place.

So… How Common Are Holiday Bonuses?

At this point, it’s time for some data. After all, that’s what makes economics fun. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks access to nonproduction bonuses through its compensation surveys. These include end-of-year bonuses, holiday bonuses, and other lump-sum payments that aren’t directly tied to output or hours worked.

The first thing the data make clear is that most workers do not have access to nonproduction bonuses at all. Even in the private sector, where bonuses are more common, only half of all workers have access to any kind of nonproduction bonus.

Access doesn’t give us any indication of frequency, size, or timing. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee a holiday bonus. The kind of bonus workers receive depends heavily on where they work.

When we break the data down by industry, some more patterns start to emerge.

Industries like finance and insurance, professional and scientific services, and information are the most likely to offer end-of-year bonuses. These industries tend to have higher margins, more variable profits, and compensation structures that already rely on incentive pay.

This is also where Clark likely fits. As a chemical engineer working for a large company in Chicago, his employer would most likely fall into the professional or scientific category, one of the industries where year-end bonuses are most common.

Holiday bonuses are a different story. Those are most likely to show up in construction and retail trade. These industries are more seasonal, more customer-facing, and more likely to use small, uniform bonuses as gestures of appreciation rather than performance incentives.

This contrast helps explain why holiday bonuses feel culturally familiar even if they’re statistically uncommon. They tend to appear in visible, seasonal industries. Places where customers, coworkers, and communities are more likely to notice them.

But industry is only part of the story. The type of work you do matters just as much.

At the occupational level, management positions are the most likely to have access to end-of-year bonuses (nearly 19%), but they’re much less likely to receive holiday bonuses (around 6%). For managers, bonuses are more often tied to firm performance than the calendar.

By contrast, service and production workers are far more likely to receive holiday bonuses than end-of-year bonuses. These payments are typically smaller, more uniform, and not tied to individual output. They function less as incentives and more as signals of appreciation.

Taken together, the pattern is clear. Higher-level, salaried workers are more likely to receive performance-based or year-end bonuses. Frontline and production workers are more likely to see holiday bonuses. That is, if they see a bonus at all.

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t go back to the 1980s, so we can’t say how common holiday bonuses were when Christmas Vacation came out. But they do tell us how relevant Clark’s situation is today.

It’s possible that holiday bonuses were once a more common feature of working life, which would help explain Hollywood’s comfort in weaving them into Clark’s story. But today, the data suggest they’re anything but routine.

Why Holiday Bonuses Are Tricky for Firms

Let’s quickly revisit a comment earlier about the dangers of offering end-of-year and holiday bonuses. The closing scenes in Christmas Vacation capture it perfectly.

Once workers expect a bonus, it stops functioning as a reward and starts functioning like regular income. And income expectations are powerful. They shape spending decisions, saving behavior, and stress levels. From the firm’s perspective, a once-optional payment quietly turns into a liability. Skip it once, and morale takes a hit far larger than the bonus ever delivered.

That’s likely why many companies have moved away from holiday bonuses and replaced them with performance bonuses, profit sharing, or nothing at all. Those alternatives preserve flexibility and keep the link between pay and performance clear. Holiday bonuses, once routine, do the opposite. They lock in expectations without locking in productivity.

Final Thoughts

That final scene is also a good moment to pause and think about the personal finance side of all this. Expected income isn’t the same as income in hand. Bonuses are, by design, discretionary. That’s what makes them useful to firms. It’s also what makes them risky to rely on when planning big purchases. Treating a bonus like guaranteed income works only if everything goes right.

To be fair, things do work out for Clark. His boss has a change of heart. The bonus appears. It’s a Christmas movie, after all. Outcomes are less cinematic in real life. The safer move is usually to wait until the money actually shows up before spending it.

And if it doesn’t? Accept the Jelly of the Month Club, pour some eggnog, and remember that economics can also explain why kidnapping your boss is almost never the optimal response to a disappointing bonus.

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