Working hours are a fundamental determinant of economic growth and wellbeing, but we still lack a comprehensive picture of how they vary globally and historically. This column presents a new database covering 160 countries, documenting global patterns in hours worked. Hours per adult average 25 per week, with a strong bell shape by age. Women supply 35% of GDP-producing hours. Hours among prime-age adults remain stable with development, with falling male hours offset by rising female labour-force participation. Labour taxes are negatively related to hours worked, likely due to social spending, formal work, and labour regulations.
Working hours are a fundamental determinant of economic growth and wellbeing, as mirrored by recent policy debates on the implementation of a shorter workweek in European countries (Jarosch et al. 2025). Yet, despite significant efforts made by statistical institutes to field high-quality labour force surveys, we still lack a comprehensive picture of how hours worked vary around the world and historically. The most comprehensive attempt to date is by Bick et al. (2018), who studied how hours worked vary with development in a cross-section of 80 countries, covering 41% of the world population.
In a new paper (Gethin and Saez 2025), we build a new database on hours worked covering 160 countries, representative of 97% of the world’s population. Our database also includes time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries at all levels of development. We use this database to document novel stylised factors on global working hours and their determinants. We establish five main findings:
- Global hours worked per adult (age 15+) reach about 25 per week. Hours worked are very strongly bell-shaped with age. Women supply 35% of (GDP-producing) hours worked, while men supply 65%.
- Hours worked per adult are mildly bell-shaped with GDP per capita but weakly correlated with development overall.
- Hours worked by the young and elderly decline with development, and this is driven by school attendance and the development of public pension systems.
- Hours among prime-age adults are stable with development, due to a great convergence in hours worked by gender: reductions in male hours conditional on work are offset by increases in female labour-force participation.
- Labour taxes are strongly negatively related to hours worked, but this correlation is explained by social spending and the development of formal work and labour regulations, which play a major role in explaining the reduction in hours worked in higher-income countries.
A new database on global hours worked
The main data sources for our database are household surveys (typically labour-force surveys) fielded by statistical institutes. These surveys record detailed information on hours worked, together with other socioeconomic variables such as age, gender, sector of employment, and earnings. The International Labour Organization and the World Bank have collected and harmonised many surveys over the past decades. We accessed data on hours worked from these databases, which constitute our primary data source. We complement them with other surveys from various international and country-specific data sources. The resulting database includes almost every labour force survey ever fielded in the world that still has a usable microfile. It covers 160 countries, representative of 97% of the world’s population. We also constructed time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries at all levels of development.
In all cases, we follow international conventions and measure weekly hours worked in all jobs that contribute to GDP. We thus include unpaid agricultural work (which produces goods and hence is included in GDP) but exclude unpaid home services such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children or elderly family members.
Drawing on this database, we establish five new stylised facts.
1. Global hours worked
We start by constructing truly global statistics on hours worked. Fifty-nine per cent of the world’s adult population (aged 15+) is employed. They work an average of 43 hours per week. This implies that weekly hours per adult are about 25.
Global hours worked vary very strongly by age and gender (Figure 1). Young (age 15–19) and elderly (age 65+) workers work about 5–10 hours per week, while prime-age men work 40–45 hours per week. Women supply 35% of (GDP-producing) hours worked, while men supply 65%. These age and gender patterns are mostly driven by the extensive employment-rate margin.
Figure 1 Global working hours by age and gender
2. Hours worked over the course of development
Beyond this average figure, there are large cross-country variations in hours worked. Hours worked per adult are mildly bell-shaped with GDP per capita: on average, they are lowest in low- and high-income countries and highest in middle-income countries. There is considerable heterogeneity within each income level, however. Countries such as Afghanistan, France, and South Africa rank among the countries with the lowest hours per adult, while countries such as China, Madagascar, and Vietnam rank among those with the longest hours. Overall, economic development explains only a small fraction of cross-country variations in working hours today.
Figure 2 Weekly hours worked per adult over the course of development
The bell-shaped pattern of hours worked with development is entirely driven by the intensive margin. Employment rates are flat with development, while hours per worker are bell-shaped with GDP per capita. This bell shape can be explained by structural change: hours per worker in manufacturing and services are strongly bell-shaped with development and very high in middle-income countries, while hours in agriculture are moderate in level and flat with GDP per capita (Figure 3).
Figure 3 Weekly hours worked by sector over the course of development
3. Hours worked by the young and elderly
In contrast to overall hours worked per adult, hours worked by the young (aged 15–19) and elderly (aged 60+) strongly decline with development. This relationship is fully driven by school attendance and the development of public pension systems (Figure 4). Once these two variables are accounted for, GDP per capita is uncorrelated with young and elderly working hours. In other words, the young and elderly work lower hours in higher-income countries not because of higher income per se, but because of the development of public education and pension systems that are associated with it.
Figure 4 Schools and pensions and hours worked by the young and elderly
(a) School attendance and hours of work of the young (15–19)
(b) Pension coverage and hours of work of the elderly (60+)
4. Hours worked among prime-age adults
Hours worked among prime-age adults (aged 20–59) are very slightly bell-shaped with GDP per capita, primarily due to the sectoral dynamics outlined in section 1 above, but remarkably stable over the course of development overall. This stability particularly stands out in historical time series. Figure 5 plots the evolution of prime-age hours worked over the course of development from a historical perspective. Each point corresponds to average hours worked across countries of a given region in a specific decade (and the last dot for each series represents the 2020s). The trajectory of the US covers the entire 1900s–2020s period. Prime-age hours appear strikingly stable over time. For instance, they reached about 30 hours per week in the US in 1900, exactly the same value as the one observed today.
Figure 5 Hours worked among prime-age adults in historical perspective
This stability masks a remarkable divergence between men and women (Figure 6). In many countries and regions, such as Indonesia, Latin America, the US, and Western Europe, hours worked by men have declined at exactly the same pace as hours worked by women have increased. The decline in male hours has been primarily driven by the intensive margin (hours per worker), while the rise in female hours can be explained by the extensive margin (employment rates). This suggests that the process of development tends to equalise hours across genders, reducing the long hours of working men while allowing more women to become employed in GDP-generating activities.
Figure 6 Hours worked among prime-age men and women in historical perspective
5. Hours worked, taxes, and labour regulations in comparative and historical perspective
Finally, our database allows us to revisit the relationship between labour taxes and hours worked. A large literature documents a strong negative correlation between taxes and hours, mostly focusing on rich countries (e.g. Fang et al. 2017, Paule-Paludkiewicz et al. 2018, Ohanian et al. 2008). We revisit this relationship across a much broader sample of countries, combining our database with recently compiled series on tax revenue (Bachas et al. 2024) and government expenditure around the world (Fisher-Post and Gethin 2025).
We find that labour taxes are strongly negatively correlated with prime-age hours worked (Figure 7 covering prime-age men; the same relationship holds for women when conditioning on the Muslim/Hindu population share, which is a strong determinant of female hours worked). Hours reach about 45 in India, where labour taxes are below 5% of GDP, compared to below 30 in France where taxes exceed 45% of GDP.
Figure 7 Labour taxes and hours of work of prime-age men
The main limitation of this analysis is that there may be other unobserved variables correlated with both taxes and development that also reduce work hours. Two major candidates are social spending, which can reduce work hours through income effects, and labour regulations and formal work, which reduce work hours by regulating various dimensions of work such as the maximum workweek, overtime pay, and paid vacation.
Our results show that these two unobserved factors explain most of the negative correlation between hours and taxes. Once controlling for social spending, labour regulations, and formal work, the effect of labour taxes on hours drops to zero in most specifications. In other words, labour taxes depress hours worked not mainly by reducing the return to work but rather because they correlate with the development of social spending, formal work, and the substantial regulations of working hours that come with it. Together, our findings suggest that cultural and social choices often encoded in public policy powerfully shape hours worked over and above pure economic development.
Source : VOXeu
