A sweeping new study by economists of the World Bank drawing on labour force surveys from 160 countries and covering 97% of the world’s adult population found:
The average employed person worldwide works 42 hours per week — virtually identical to the 40-hour standard written into law in many countries, suggesting the global norm and the legal standard have converged in practice.
When non-employed adults are included, the global average drops to 24.5 hours per week per adult, reflecting how large a share of the world’s adult population is outside paid work at any given time.
Men supply 65% of all hours worked globally; women supply 35% — a gap driven almost entirely by employment rates rather than hours worked on the job. Employed women work 37 hours per week compared to 45 for employed men.
Only 48% of women globally are employed, compared to 71% of men — a gap that persists across nearly every income level but narrows significantly in wealthier nations.
Moving from 0% to 100% Muslim or Hindu population share in a country is associated with an 11-hour reduction in weekly hours worked by prime-age women — the single strongest cultural variable in the entire dataset.
Former communist countries show markedly higher female labour participation, a legacy of systems that required equal workforce participation regardless of gender, and the effect persists decades after the fall of communism.
In the poorest countries, at least 10% of workers put in more than 60 hours per week. In rich countries like the US, France, and Germany, fewer than 10% work more than 50 hours — reflecting how formal employment regulation compresses the distribution of hours.
About 11.5% of the world’s employed population works exactly 40 hours per week — a striking spike in the data that reflects the power of regulation and social norms to coordinate behaviour at scale.
School attendance explains nearly 70% of the cross-country variation in how much teenagers work — far more than GDP per capita alone, which explains only 23%.
Moving from 0% to 100% pension coverage for the elderly is associated with roughly 11 fewer hours of work per week among people aged 60 and above — confirming that retirement is a policy outcome, not simply a natural consequence of aging or wealth.
The US is the only country for which a homogeneous, century-long series of work hours exists covering the full population — and it shows remarkable stability in prime-age work hours from the 1900s to today, with the Great Depression the only major interruption.
China vs. Germany: though employment rates are similar in both countries, prime-age adults in China work roughly 50% more hours per week than their German counterparts — a gap explained almost entirely by differences in working-hours regulations and formal employment structure, not culture or motivation.
The database underlying the study contains surveys of over 470 million individuals across 2,500 surveys conducted since the 1960s, making it by far the largest harmonized labor dataset ever constructed.
In middle-income countries, workers in manufacturing and private services regularly average around 50 hours per week — the highest intensive hours of any development stage, echoing the 19th-century industrial experience of today’s wealthy nations.
The rise in female employment and the fall in male working hours have exactly offset each other in many countries over recent decades, producing a deceptive stability in aggregate prime-age hours that masks one of the most significant labour market shifts in modern history.
World’s largest Study of Work Hours
