Guess which country has the shortest working week
A lot of people complain they spend a lifetime at their place of work. This is despite the fact we don’t have a 10-hour workday, as used to be a common practice in China.
While you’re enjoying your weekend, we offer you to find out which country provides its workers with the largest amount of spare time.
Hard-working Europe?
The European Union has set a 48-hour working week (including overtime). However, some countries have set their own limitations. Norway, for instance, caps the working week at 40 hours, and most collective agreements there set it at 37.5. Most often, the average European works about 36 hours a week (35.9, to be exact).
The shortest working week is in the Netherlands — it’s only about 32 hours. Besides, the Dutch promote strong cultural norms and legal rights to work part-time while keeping proportional benefits.
The French have a legal 35-hour working week, while the Irish work about 36 hours on average. These rates are among the lowest in the world, but the productivity of these countries’ human resources is rather high. In France, though, the 35-hour week exists mostly on paper, and plenty of employees work more. Introduced by a Socialist government in the late 1990s, it has been fiercely defended by French workers ever since. When lawmakers loosened it in 2008 to let companies negotiate longer hours, the move led to a number of strikes and protests.
The Danes work 33.9 hours a week on average, even though standard contracts there run to about 37 hours.
Germans are believed to be workaholics, but really the average working week in Germany is just 33.9 hours, one of the shortest in the EU. In addition to this, it is a common practice in Germany to reduce the working hours in case of financial difficulties (instead of dismissal of staff). Austrians, Belgians and Finns also average fewer than 35 hours a week.
The most hard-working Europeans are Greeks, Bulgarians, and Poles. The Greeks work an average of 39.6 hours per week, the longest in the EU, and Greek men in full-time jobs put in 41.8 hours. Bulgarians and Poles are close behind at 38.7 hours each. The Portuguese average 37.4 hours, above the EU average but far from the top of the table.
Asia needs laws to force people work less
Many Asian countries work much harder. In China, though, working hours are now capped at the legal level: the standard working day is 8 hours and the standard week 40 hours, and overtime may not exceed 36 hours a month. In 2021, the country’s top court went further and ruled the popular “996” schedule (9am to 9pm, six days a week) illegal. However, in practice, the average Chinese still works somewhere between 45 and 49 hours a week, depending on the dataset. Employees get 5 to 15 days of paid annual leave, depending on years of service, plus 13 days of public holidays.
The work contract in Japan sets no more than 40 working hours per week. Nevertheless, all of us have heard of what a career move means to the Japanese. Promotion often depends on the amount of time that an employee spends at his post. Since 2019, though, overtime has been capped by law at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year (with higher limits for special agreements). Average annual hours have fallen from 2,092 in 1988 to 1,617 in 2024. Even so, about 15% of workers still put in 49 hours or more a week.
India and Thailand both allow a six-day, 48-hour working week by law. Indians work an average of about 46 hours a week, while Thailand’s average is lower, at around 42 hours, and many companies there have moved to a 40-hour week.
So what’s the best schedule?
One of the wealthiest men on the planet, Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim, once said in an interview that people should work no more than 3 days per week. However, the working day would be as long as 11 hours.
There are a lot of people who believe that a “4 days a week” schedule is the best solution. Many experts believe that this schedule will be convenient for so-called “baby boomers” (who were born between 1946 and 1964). That way they will have enough time to take care of their families. Yet, no country has a mandatory, nationwide four-day workweek with reduced hours and full pay. Iceland, Belgium and the UAE practice a shortened workweek, though it most often goes down to a compressed schedule rather than fewer working hours.
But there are also a lot of people who support the idea of a 21-hour working week. They consider this approach would solve a number of problems: unemployment, over-consumption, global carbon emissions, and even inequality. British New Economics Foundation says that a shorter working week may interrupt a vicious circle of modern life (everybody lives to work, works to earn money, and uses the money to consume more and more). Today, with AI simplifying numerous job functions, this idea seems more plausible.
