Here’s How Many Hours Europeans Work Each Week

There’s an old joke: are you working hard, or hardly working?

“Hard work” is difficult to measure, but it is possible to know who’s working the longest.

This heatmap, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, visualizes the average hours Europeans work each week by country, as sourced from Eurostat’s Labor Force Survey (2023).

The dataset covers employed persons aged 20–64 in a “main occupation” and includes full and part time work.

The Balkans Work the Longest in Europe

Less wealthy countries of Europe (by per capita GDP) tend to have longer work weeks. For example, people in the Balkans—including Türkiye, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Greece, and Romania—all put in an average of 40+ hours a week at their main jobs.

Rank	Country	Average Weekly Hours Worked (2023)
1	🇹🇷 Türkiye	44
2	🇷🇸 Serbia	42
3	🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina	41
4	🇬🇷 Greece	40
5	🇷🇴 Romania	40
6	🇵🇱 Poland	39
7	🇧🇬 Bulgaria	39
8	🇨🇾 Cyprus	39
9	🇱🇻 Latvia	38
10	🇱🇹 Lithuania	38
11	🇭🇷 Croatia	38
12	🇸🇮 Slovenia	38
13	🇨🇿 Czechia	38
14	🇭🇺 Hungary	38
15	🇵🇹 Portugal	38
16	🇸🇰 Slovakia	38
17	🇲🇹 Malta	37
18	🇪🇪 Estonia	36
19	🇪🇸 Spain	36
20	🇮🇸 Iceland	36
21	🇨🇭 Switzerland	36
22	🇮🇹 Italy	36
23	🇫🇷 France	36
24	🇸🇪 Sweden	36
25	🇮🇪 Ireland	36
26	🇱🇺 Luxembourg	35
27	🇧🇪 Belgium	35
28	🇫🇮 Finland	35
29	🇩🇰 Denmark	34
30	🇩🇪 Germany	34
31	🇳🇴 Norway	34
32	🇦🇹 Austria	34
33	🇳🇱 Netherlands	32
N/A	🇪🇺 EU (2020)	36

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My wife’s European family loves to tell me how little they work. They are also paying 70% taxes. I wish I cared, but I don’t really even wish that.