Working hours

The hours a worker puts in over a year, on average.

This is the average number of hours worked per worker in a year, counting full-time and part-time workers alike. It falls when working weeks get shorter, holidays get longer or more people work part-time. The figures come from the Penn World Table, which draws on national accounts and labour statistics, and Our World in Data republishes them. The series starts in 1950; earlier historical estimates are left out.

World map · Annual working hours per worker

Year

Source: Feenstra et al. – Penn World Table (2025); Huberman and Minns (2005) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-08-05) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

Over time · Annual working hours per worker

Source: Feenstra et al. – Penn World Table (2025); Huberman and Minns (2005) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-08-05) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

Years

Show the numbers

All countries · Annual working hours per worker

Continent Year

Source: Feenstra et al. – Penn World Table (2025); Huberman and Minns (2005) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2025-08-05) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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