Michiganders Have The 4th Most Free Time
This must be the season for “studies” and lists.
Now Coleman Furniture, they certainly have a stake in this “study”, has ranked the states that have the most “free time” according to their scoring. Michigan was ranked 4th in the country.
The Coleman Furniture study used the following methodology:
First, we needed to determine how much free time people in each state had. While the BLS periodically publishes a report on “leisure time” like the one we mentioned before, it comes in the form of a single set of questions and is all voluntary – we thought a better measurement would be to create a score for each state.
We used BLS and American Community Survey data to gauge how much time each week jobs were taking up, based off of time spent commuting and average hours in a work week
Our third factor was how much vacation time workers used, represented as a percentage of the total allowed vacation hours from the latest Bureau of Economic Analysis
They then used these three elements, scored them and came up with their rankings. These elements and their scoring gave each state their “free time” scores and rankings.
Their top ten states with the most “free time” were as follow’s:
- Maine
- Wisconsin
- Alaska
- Michigan
- Utah
- Ohio
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Oregon
- Arkansas
Maybe they are right or maybe not but I will say that having “free time” is certainly a good thing for me as long as you are actually working at least 40 hours per week and can pay your bills.