Countries by Average Annual Working Hours 2024

This dataset ranks eight OECD member countries by the average number of hours each employed person worked over the course of 2024. Mexico tops the table at 2,226 hours, followed by Costa Rica on 2,149. Germany sits at the other end with 1,349 hours, and the Netherlands is barely ahead of it on 1,427.

The distance between the two ends of this table is larger than it first looks. The gap between Mexico and Germany is 877 hours a year — the equivalent of about twenty-two extra forty-hour weeks, or roughly five additional months of full-time work. Spread across a calendar year, the average Mexican worker puts in about 42.8 hours a week against 25.9 in Germany. Only three of the eight countries here average more than 1,900 hours: Mexico, Costa Rica and South Korea, a figure that is nonetheless far below what the same series recorded for South Korea in the 1990s.

One comparison usually surprises people. The United States records 1,791 hours and Japan 1,626 — so the country with the international reputation for punishing office hours actually averages 165 hours a year less than the United States, about four working weeks.

A note on what the number is and is not. The OECD divides the total hours worked in an economy by the average number of people in employment, and that includes part-time workers, seasonal workers and the self-employed. A country where a large share of jobs are part-time therefore records a lower average even if its full-time employees work long days, which is the main reason the Dutch and German figures sit so low. The series is designed for comparing a country with itself over time; comparisons between countries are indicative rather than exact, because national statistical offices measure hours in slightly different ways.