Average weekly working hours in the US

How long is the average work week in the US?

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Map of how many hours a week people in the US work.

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We looked at how long Europeans work on average every week. Today we’re going to look at the US. We can see straight away, that the average work week in the US is similar to the countries on the lower end in Europe (Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland). While the average work week in Europe varies from 30 to 51 hours, the differences within the US are much smaller (32-36).

In three states, the average work week is shorter than 33 hours a week: Delaware (32.5), Hawaii (32.7) and Montana (32.8). In most of the US the work week lasts 34-35 hours

The longest average work week is in D.C., Louisiana and Texas. In all three states the average work week is 35.9 hours.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any recent data on the number of part-time workers by state. This old table, makes me believe that there is probably a link between the number of part-time workers and the average weekly hours of work per state. Just like we saw in several European countries.

This dataset comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

One response to “Average weekly working hours in the US”

PersonGuy

Jun 26, 2023 at 10:09 pm

The OECD says that Americans work longer than the figures given here. According to your two articles about European and American average weekly working hours, American workweeks are shorter than European ones, with the only exception being the Netherlands. Your sources have been official government websites as well, so they seem to be trustworthy. But the also trustworthy OECD has reported that American workweeks are among the highest in the developed world. Why is there such a difference between the two sources?

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