New Study Finds the 'Optimal' Length of a Workweek (and It's Not 40 Hours)
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Most employees don't have much say in the length of their workweek: A full-time position stipulates a certain amount of hours, and that's how much you have to work. Period.
But how much would people want to work if they could choose their total hours — even knowing that less work means less pay?
In a new working paper shared by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Duke University economists analyzed data from Germany and found that the "optimal" workweek is 37 hours.
The paper draws findings from the German Socio-Economic Panel, a long-running dataset that includes the following question: "If you could choose your own working hours, taking into account that your income would change according to the number of hours: How many hours would you want to work?"
The researchers found that, based on folks' responses, more than two-thirds of sampled workers can be considered "overworked." That means their desired hours (37.5 per week on average) exceed actual hours (42.7 per week on average).
The paper also considered a 1991-2008 dataset from the U.K. that asked workers if they'd prefer more or fewer hours, as well as similar (but even older) U.S. government surveys. In these datasets, respondents' desired hours weren't recorded. Still, the data suggests that people in the U.K. and Germany share a preference to work fewer hours, "while the U.S. sharply differs, featuring a much larger fraction of workers wishing to increase hours," the Duke researchers wrote in the paper.
Is a 40-hour workweek too long?
In the U.S., the idea of the 40-hour workweek was cemented in 1940 under revisions to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It requires overtime of at least one and one-half pay for employees who work over 40 hours.
However, under U.S. laws, there are exceptions for "professional" and "administrative" employees, meaning that people earning more than $35,568 annually are not necessarily entitled to overtime pay.
Last year, the Department of Labor enacted a rule expanding overtime pay by increasing that cutoff amount to $58,656, but the policy was later vacated by a judge in Texas. The government's lawyers filed fresh appeals this month, continuing to fight for what was originally a Biden-era change.
Despite the "norm" of the 40-hour workweek, it's very common in the U.S. for people to work more than 40 hours per week. Prior studies have shown that Americans have worse work-life balance than workers in some European countries, working 400 hours more per year than Germans, for instance.
Some other countries have explored shorter work schedules in recent experiments.
Most notably, in April, tens of thousands of government employees in Tokyo are getting an option to work four days per week. Japan's low fertility rate has been cited as a motivation for the experiment. Some German and Australian companies have also offered four-day workweek options.
While some groups have suggested a four-day workweek in the U.S., the idea is more of a dream than reality, at least for now. According to a new Gallup report, the average full-time worker in the U.S. reported a roughly 43-hour workweek in 2024, down only slightly from 44.1 hours in 2019.
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