These are results which somewhat shake up prejudices. A study on actual weekly working time in European countries, published by Eurostat on May 30, reveals that in 2023 people aged 20 to 64 worked on average 36 hours per week.
If the countries with the longest working week were Greece (39.8 hours), Romania (39.5) and Poland (39.3), the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, on the other hand, are those whose inhabitants work the least during the week (32.2, 33.6 and 34 hours respectively).
France, for its part, is a little above its Germanic neighbor, with 36 effective hours, full and part time combined. This last element partly explains these results: full-time French employees work shorter hours than their European neighbors, which is not the case for part-time employees.
Employers work more
Further on, the study also provides information on the profile of workers. In the EU, in 2023, men working full time worked 39.8 hours per week, compared to 37.8 hours for women in the same group. For women, the longest working week was observed in Romania (39.5 hours), Latvia (39.4 hours) and Greece (39.3 hours). On the men’s side, seven EU countries have a working week of more than 40 hours on average, including Greece (42.5 hours per week), Cyprus (41.3) and Poland (41.1).
The gender distribution was not the same for part-time workers. At EU level, men and women worked the same number of hours last year, around 22 per week.
The average weekly working time also varies according to the different sectors of economic activity. Last year, the economic activities with the longest working week were agriculture, forestry and fishing (41.5 effective working hours), mining and quarrying (39.1) and construction (38 .9), while household activities as employers (26.7 effective working hours), education (31.9) and arts, entertainment and leisure (33.0) recorded the weeks of shortest work.
On professional status, finally, European employers had, in 2023, the greatest number of usual weekly working hours in their main job – 47 hours – followed by self-employed workers without employees, with 40.4 hours. The countries with the longest average working week for employers are Belgium and France (both 50.6 usual working hours per week).
It is also in Belgium that we see the biggest difference in terms of the number of usual working hours per week: 35.3 hours for employees, compared to 43.6 for self-employed workers.