Countries Where People Work the Most Hours (Per Year Ranked)

The average full-time worker in Germany completes approximately 1,349 hours of paid work per year. In Cambodia, the equivalent figure is roughly 2,456 hours. That 82% gap, compounded across a 40-year career, amounts to more than 44,000 extra hours — roughly 11 additional full-time years of labour. The difference is not about effort or character. It reflects labour law, economic structure, the presence or absence of social safety nets, and cultural norms about what work is for.

This article draws on OECD hours-worked data, ILO (International Labour Organization) labour statistics, and published research on the relationship between working time and productivity.

Source: OECD — Hours worked indicator

What "hours worked" actually measures — and where the data gets complicated

The OECD defines "average annual hours actually worked per worker" as the total number of hours worked over the year divided by the average number of people in employment. This includes paid overtime and excludes holidays, paid sick leave, and parental leave. For OECD member countries, this is among the most comparable and reliable economic statistics available.

Outside the OECD, data quality degrades significantly. Many of the world's longest-working countries — Cambodia, Bangladesh, Myanmar — are not OECD members. Their figures come from ILO modelled estimates and national labour surveys with varying methodological rigour. Treat non-OECD figures as approximations.

There is also a critical measurement gap: unpaid work is absent from all official statistics. Domestic labour, childcare, elder care, and subsistence farming are not counted. This matters enormously for understanding total human work burden — particularly for women, who in virtually every country studied carry a substantially larger share of unpaid domestic and care labour than men. The official rankings below measure paid hours only.

Countries with the most hours worked (per year, per worker)

Rank	Country	Hours/year	Hours/week (approx.)
1	Cambodia	2,456	47.2
2	Myanmar	2,400	46.2
3	Bangladesh	2,376	45.7
4	Singapore	2,238	43.1
5	Malaysia	2,163	41.6
6	Mexico	2,128	40.9
7	Philippines	2,123	40.8
8	Costa Rica	2,073	39.9
9	Hong Kong	2,003	38.5
10	South Korea	1,928	37.1
11	Chile	1,916	36.8
12	Israel	1,895	36.4
13	Greece	1,886	36.3
14	Poland	1,835	35.3
15	United States	1,791	34.4

Countries with the fewest hours worked per year

Rank	Country	Hours/year	Notes
1	Germany	1,349	Legally protected reduced hours; strong unions
2	Denmark	1,363	37-hour official work week
3	Norway	1,427	Strong labour protections
4	Netherlands	1,427	World's highest part-time employment rate
5	France	1,500	35-hour work week law (2000)
6	Austria	1,501	Strong collective bargaining
7	Finland	1,518	Nordic model; generous leave
8	Belgium	1,571	Mandatory 4-day week pilot
9	Ireland	1,591	—
10	Sweden	1,610	High parental leave uptake reduces average

Source: OECD Data Explorer — Average annual hours worked

Where this data comes from

All hours-worked figures in this ranking come from the OECD, which defines "average annual hours actually worked per worker" as the total hours worked over the year divided by average employment. OECD data is standardised and highly comparable across its 38 member countries. For non-OECD nations (Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh), figures come from International Labour Organization (ILO) modelled estimates and national labour surveys — these carry greater uncertainty and should be treated as approximations. A critical limitation: all official working-hour statistics measure paid work only. Unpaid domestic labour, childcare, subsistence farming, and elder care are not counted, creating systematic undercounting of actual human work burdens. This exclusion is particularly significant in developing countries where informal and subsistence work is substantial.

A short history of the working day: from 60-hour weeks to 35-hour laws

For most of human history, labour was not measured in hours. Agricultural work expanded to fill daylight and seasons; rest was governed by weather, religious custom, and harvest cycles. The concept of a standardised workday is an industrial invention.

The 60-to-72-hour, six-day week was standard in European and American factories during the 19th century. This was not a cultural preference — it was the baseline extraction of maximum labour from workers with no power to resist it. Factory children worked 12-hour days in British mills until the 1833 Factory Act restricted their hours. Adult workers had no such protection.

The eight-hour day was a central demand of 19th-century labour movements on both sides of the Atlantic. The phrase "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will" was coined by Welsh social reformer Robert Owen around 1817. The Ford Motor Company famously adopted the eight-hour day and five-day week in 1926 — not primarily out of benevolence but from evidence that worker productivity per hour increased when hours were reduced. Henry Ford's reasoning was closer to engineering than ethics.

France passed its 35-hour work week law in 2000 under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin — one of the most aggressive statutory reductions of working time in modern history. The law was controversial and was partially liberalised in subsequent years, but France still averages around 1,500 hours annually.

The Netherlands has taken a different path to short hours: not through statutory limits but through extraordinarily high rates of part-time employment. Approximately 46% of Dutch workers work part-time — the highest rate in the OECD — with women accounting for the majority. Dutch culture normalises part-time work across gender and career stage in ways unusual by international comparison.

South Korea and Japan: the overwork culture paradox

South Korea (approximately 1,928 hours/year) and Japan (approximately 1,896 hours/year) are the OECD's most striking outliers. Both countries have per-capita incomes comparable to or exceeding Western European levels. Both work substantially more than their income peers in Europe. And both have well-documented, institutionally recognised overwork crises.

South Korea's ppalli ppalli culture — roughly translatable as "hurry-hurry" — drives a norm of competitive long-hours signalling. Leaving work before one's manager is culturally unacceptable in many Korean workplaces, even when substantive work is finished. The result is what economists call "presenteeism" — physical presence without proportionate productive output. Korea has among the world's highest rates of work-related depression and suicide, partly attributable to workplace stress.

Japan's equivalent concept is karoshi (過労死) — literally "overwork death." This is a legally recognised category of mortality: the Japanese state and courts acknowledge that overwork causes death, and companies can face legal liability for karoshi. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare reported 1,304 recognised cases of overwork-related deaths and health disorders in fiscal 2024 — a record — with more than 1,000 cases involving depression and mental health disorders for the first time.

Source: Nippon.com — Japan recognizes record karoshi cases FY2024

One in 10 Japanese male workers logs more than 60 hours per week. The government introduced "Premium Friday" — a campaign encouraging workers to leave at 3pm on the last Friday of each month — to limited effect against deeply embedded cultural norms. Both Japan and South Korea have high GDP per capita but significantly lower GDP per hour worked than Germany or Denmark, indicating their output is achieved through volume rather than efficiency.

The United States: more hours than Europe, fewer than Asia

Americans work approximately 1,791 hours per year — considerably more than Western Europeans, considerably less than East Asian peers or developing-world workers. US hours have actually increased slightly from 1980s levels, bucking the European trend of continued decline.

Several structural features explain American exceptionalism in working hours:

No statutory paid vacation. The United States is the only OECD country with no federal minimum paid vacation requirement. American workers receive paid leave at employer discretion — the median is 10 days after one year, compared to 20 to 28 mandatory days in most European countries. The result: Americans forfeit an estimated 768 million vacation days per year, either through employer restriction or voluntary non-use.

No universal paid sick leave. Many American workers — particularly low-wage workers — have no paid sick days. Going sick means losing pay, creating powerful incentives to work through illness. This has well-documented public health consequences, including the spread of communicable diseases in workplaces.

Healthcare tied to employment. Employer-sponsored health insurance is the dominant healthcare funding model in the US. Losing employment typically means losing health insurance. This creates enormous fear around job loss that incentivises long hours, excessive compliance, and reluctance to push back on overwork demands.

Cultural identity. American culture more strongly equates work ethic with moral virtue than European cultures. "What do you do?" is typically among the first questions Americans ask at social gatherings. The identification of personal identity with professional productivity is measurably stronger in the US than in Nordic countries, where work is understood as a means to life rather than the content of it.

The practical result: Americans average 4 to 6 fewer weeks of leisure per year than comparable German or French workers.

The productivity-hours trade-off: working less, producing more

The relationship between hours worked and economic output is counterintuitive. Countries that work fewer hours per worker frequently produce more per hour:

Country	Hours/year	GDP per hour worked (approx. USD)
Norway	1,427	~$92
Denmark	1,363	~$78
France	1,500	~$72
Germany	1,349	~$71
United States	1,791	~$77
Greece	1,886	~$35
South Korea	1,928	~$45
Mexico	2,128	~$21

The pattern is robust and well-replicated in labour economics research. The mechanism has multiple components: cognitive and physical fatigue reduce per-hour output at high hour volumes; countries with fewer working hours tend to invest more in capital equipment, technology, and worker training per labour hour, raising efficiency; and selection effects — more productive economies can afford to work shorter hours, which then sustains or improves productivity.

This is the empirical foundation for the 4-day work week. Working 32 hours per week for the same pay is not a gift from employers — it is a structural change with evidence-based productivity arguments behind it.

Mexico: long hours, low output, structural explanation

Mexico (approximately 2,128 hours/year per OECD data) is among the longest-working OECD members but has among the lowest GDP per hour worked — approximately $21, compared to Germany's $71 for far fewer hours. This is not a contradiction; it is a structural portrait.

Mexico's economy is dominated by the informal sector — street vending, small-scale construction, subsistence agriculture, and unregistered service businesses that employ the majority of the labour force. Informal workers have no hour protections, minimal capital equipment, and limited access to credit or technology. They achieve output through extended hours of manual effort rather than capital intensity.

The formal-sector Mexican worker has legal rights to a 48-hour maximum work week — but enforcement in the informal sector is minimal. The OECD's average-hours figure for Mexico captures the combined reality: a formal sector with average hours closer to Latin American regional norms, and a large informal sector pulling the average upward.

Source: OECD — Hours worked by country

The 4-day work week: what the evidence actually shows

The 4-day work week has shifted from fringe proposal to mainstream policy experiment since 2021. Iceland ran the largest trial (2015–2019), with 2,500 workers across public sector roles moving to 35 or 36 hours per week for the same pay. Results: productivity maintained or improved in most workplaces; worker wellbeing improved significantly; no deterioration in service quality.

Microsoft Japan's 2019 trial — closing offices on Fridays for one month — reported a 40% productivity increase. The UK's 2022 trial involving 61 companies found that 92% intended to continue the 4-day week after the trial period. Workers reported less stress, lower rates of sick days, and no reduction in output.

The caveats matter. Trials tend to involve motivated companies and engaged workers who want the experiment to succeed. Service sectors where output is not easily quantified are harder to evaluate. Physical manufacturing and healthcare cannot simply compress 5 days of required work into 4. The evidence is promising but the generalisation to all sectors and contexts remains an open question.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What's the trend — are people working more or less overall?
A: In wealthy countries, average annual hours have generally declined over the 20th century, from 60-plus-hour weeks to 35–40-hour norms. Since the 1980s, the decline has slowed for high-income knowledge workers. The US is a partial exception: hours have not declined as consistently as in Europe. In developing countries, long hours persist because structural conditions — poverty, informal work, no safety net — make reduced hours economically impossible.

Q: Does working longer hours make a country richer?
A: No. The richest countries — Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Switzerland — work relatively few hours. Long hours are associated with poverty and low productivity, not prosperity. At the individual level, highly paid professionals in wealthy economies often work long hours because hourly returns are high, but this differs from the structural long-hours pattern in poor countries driven by necessity.

Q: Why do women and men work different total hours?
A: Official statistics measure paid hours only. When unpaid domestic and care work is included, women in virtually every country work more total hours than men. In developing countries, women's paid hours are often shorter due to formal employment exclusion, but their total work burden including subsistence agriculture and domestic labour is larger. Gender gaps in unpaid work are among the most consistent findings in labour sociology.

Q: What is the healthiest number of hours to work per week?
A: Beyond 39–40 hours per week, health risks increase measurably, with cardiovascular risk, depression, and anxiety rising steeply above 55 hours. A 2015 Lancet meta-analysis of 600,000 workers found 55+ hour weeks associated with 33% greater stroke risk and 13% greater coronary heart disease risk. The optimal range for health is 25–40 hours per week, with diminishing productivity returns above 35–50 hours.

Q: Does remote work change how many hours people work?
A: Remote work typically increases hours worked. Studies found remote workers log longer hours, with commuting time replaced by extended work sessions and blurred work-rest boundaries. A 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research study found average workday lengthened by 48 minutes during lockdown. Effects vary by job type, household structure, and employer culture.

Q: What happened to work hours during COVID-19?
A: Total hours worked collapsed in 2020 — the ILO estimated 255 million full-time job-equivalents lost. Recovery was uneven: wealthy countries recovered faster through fiscal stimulus; developing countries saw persistent reductions in informal sectors. Most OECD countries by 2023 had returned to or exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

How remote work changed the hours-worked picture (2020–2025)

The shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic did not, on balance, reduce the hours people worked. It extended them. A 2020 NBER working paper analyzing email and meeting data from more than 21,000 companies across 16 cities found that the average workday lengthened by 48.5 minutes in the weeks following lockdown orders — driven largely by an increase in after-hours emails rather than additional formal work time. The commute disappeared; the working day absorbed the gap.

Eurofound, the European Union agency that tracks working conditions, found that teleworkers are twice as likely to exceed the 48-hour weekly working-time limit compared to office-based workers, and significantly more likely to work during rest periods or personal time. Over 80% of workers surveyed by Eurofound in Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain reported receiving work-related communications outside contracted hours during a typical week, and nearly three-quarters said it happened daily.

Microsoft's Work Trend Index research identified what it called the "triple peak day" — a pattern, largely absent before 2020, in which remote knowledge workers show a third burst of productivity activity in the hours before bed, in addition to the traditional morning and post-lunch peaks. By 2025, Microsoft's data showed that meetings after 8 pm had risen 16% year-over-year, and the average Teams user was sending 42% more chats per person after hours than before the pandemic.

Governments noticed. France had passed a right-to-disconnect law as early as 2017, requiring companies with more than 50 employees to negotiate policies governing after-hours contact. Italy followed with Act No. 81/2017 for remote workers; Portugal enacted Law 83/2021 imposing a duty on employers to refrain from contacting staff outside working hours; Belgium extended a similar right to private-sector workers in 2022. Australia went furthest in formal legal terms: in February 2024, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment Act granted Australian employees the explicit right to ignore work-related communications outside normal hours without facing reprisal.

Whether remote work actually raises productivity remains genuinely unsettled. Studies of hybrid arrangements — typically two to three days remote per week — show productivity broadly maintained or slightly improved. Full-remote arrangements show more mixed results depending on role type, household structure, and whether the employer provides structured async-work norms. The hours data and the productivity data are pointing in different directions: people are working longer, but it is not yet clear they are producing proportionally more.

Source: NBER — "Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work" (2020) | Eurofound — "Right to disconnect: Implementation and impact at company level" | Microsoft Work Trend Index — "The Rise of the Triple Peak Day"

The takeaway

The global distribution of working hours is a map of economic development, not of cultural attitudes toward diligence. The poorest countries work the longest hours because poverty leaves no alternative — no savings, no safety net, no option to work less. The wealthiest Europeans work the fewest hours not despite their prosperity but partly because of it: they can afford legislated rest, and that rest sustains the productivity that sustains the prosperity. South Korea and Japan are the cautionary examples — wealthy nations whose cultural overwork norms impose significant human costs for limited economic return, as evidenced by productivity per hour that lags far behind less-worked European peers. The US sits in an unusual middle position: richer than it needs to be to work as long as it does, lacking the legal architecture of European rest, and culturally attached to an equation of work with virtue that its Nordic peers abandoned decades ago.

Related Reading

• Countries with the Best Work-Life Balance
• Countries with the Best Quality of Life
• Countries with the Highest Minimum Wage
• Countries with the Highest Income Inequality
• Countries with the Most Gender Equality