The working day in Spain is officially 40 hours a week, a rule that has been this way since 1983, when the Workers’ Statute was modified. This involved approving the 8-hour day (or 40 hours per week) and extending annual vacations to 30 calendar days (or 22 working days), as we know it today. Previously, the legal working day was 44 hours per week.
Now, forty years later, the labor market has changed a lot, but the essentials, which are the 40 hours, remain the same. However, the issue of reducing the working day is on everyone’s lips basically due to a union demand to reduce the working day from 40 to 35 hours, or even to 32 hours while maintaining the salary, which would be the equivalent of a four-week week. days.
In this way, the workload of workers would be reduced and the quality of life would be improved, although there are also fears that it could reduce productivity. If those 32 hours a week materialized, they would be 13 hours less work per week than forty years ago.
However, the statistical office of the European Union (EU), Eurostat, places the average working day in Spain for people between 15 and 64 years of age employed full-time at 40.4 hours, according to the latest data available as of 2022.
Furthermore, this statistic confirms that working time in Spain has not only been reduced in the last four decades, it has also decreased in the last ten years by just over an hour, going from 41.5 hours on average per week. in 2012, to 40.4 hours in 2022. The reduction in hours has been 2.6%.
Another Clockify statistic also shows similar conclusions, such as that the reduction in annual hours worked in Spain between 1980 and 2022 is limited to 3%, up to 1,892 hours.
This decrease places Spain as one of the countries that has changed working hours the least in recent decades. On the contrary, countries such as Germany, France or Australia have reduced hours worked by up to 18% throughout the year, positioning themselves as the countries with the greatest variation in hours worked.
In Spain do you work a lot or not so much? The glass can be seen as half empty or half full depending on whether this figure is compared to the 38.7 hours they work in Finland or if we talk about Serbia, whose average working hours amounts to 44, according to Eurostat information.
The countries that are on par with Spain with those 40.4 hours of work per week shown by Eurostat are Germany, Ireland, Bulgaria, Belgium and Croatia. In fact, this data is aligned with the Eurozone average, and almost on par with the average in the European Union (40.5 hours.
Of the 31 countries that this statistic compares, Spain is in the 12th position of those that work the fewest hours.
And the countries that work less than 40 hours are Norway (39.7 hours), the Netherlands (39.4 hours), Denmark (39.1 hours) and Finland (38.7 hours).
On the opposite side, that is, Serbia appears at the top of the hours worked, with a total of 44 hours a week, followed by Switzerland (43.3 hours), Iceland (42.8 hours) and Greece (42.7 hours).
