Life can sometimes require you to pause your favorite activities, and Chess.com understands this, which is why we provide all members the ability to pause their online chess games using vacation time.
How to enable vacation time
Web
From your Daily Chess settings menu toggle the 'PAUSE MY GAMES! I need to go on vacation' option.
The text in red shows how much vacation time you have left. Each time you go on vacation a minimum of 24 hours of your remaining vacation budget is consumed.
Click 'Save' to start using your vacation time.
Mobile
Tap 'More' from the menu at the bottom of the screen and select 'Settings'.
Tap 'Play' and select 'Daily Chess'.
Toggle 'On Vacation' option to start using your vacation time.
When you go on vacation, you may wish to let your opponents know using the in-game chat feature.
Disabling vacation time
You can manage your vacation time by toggling the option in your Daily Chess settings.
However, please note that the following actions will also deactivate your vacation time:
Action | Description |
Making a move in a Daily game | Making a move in any of your Daily games will end your vacation for all of them. All games are paused, or no games are paused.
You can not go on vacation in individual games. |
Accepting a Daily challenge | Accepting a Daily game challenge will also end your vacation. If you start a new game, your vacation will be turned off.
Declining a challenge does NOT affect your vacation. |
Vacation time allotment
Every new Chess.com account starts with 7 days of vacation time. Members accrue additional vacation days each month, on the 1st and 15th:
Membership level |
Vacation days earned | Total vacation days earned per month |
Basic | 1 day on the 1st and 1 day on the 15th | 2 days |
| 1.5 days on the 1st and 1.5 days on the 15th | 3 days |
| 2.5 days on the 1st and 2.5 days on the 15th | 5 days |
| 2.5 days on the 1st and 2.5 days on the 15th | 5 days |
Gold
Platinum
Diamond
Maximum vacation days stored
Vacation days are capped to prevent indefinite accumulation. Once you reach these limits, additional vacation days will not accrue until some are used:
Membership level | Maxium vacation days stored |
Basic | 30 days |
| 60 days |
| 90 days |
| 90 days |
Automatic timeout protection
Premium members benefit from auto-timeout protection, which automatically enables vacation mode to prevent game losses due to timeouts.
If a premium member has less than 90 minutes left in any daily game, vacation mode will activate automatically, pausing the game.
The system checks every hour to determine if games need pausing, so games will not always be paused at the same time. For example, if the system checks and sees that there are 90 minutes left, the game will be paused. But if there are 91 minutes left when the system checks, it will not pause until it checks again 1 hour later. Then, the game would be paused at 31 minutes.
One-day minimum rule
To prevent frivolous use or abuse of vacation time, a minimum duration of one day (24 hours) applies to all vacations:
Example 1: A vacation lasting 5 minutes will still deduct 24 hours from your remaining time.
Example 2: A vacation lasting 23 hours will also deduct 24 hours.
Example 3: A vacation lasting 25 hours will deduct 25 hours.