The latest statistics from Switzerland’s federal statistics office (FSO) show that weekly working hours increased 1.8 percent in 2023 compared with the previous year.

But to draw international comparisons, some adjustments have to be made to how the working hours are calculated.

The methodology used excludes anyone who is absent for a full week from the data, meaning that the working hours appear significantly higher.

There were more absences of a week or more in Switzerland in 2023 than in the previous year, so more people were excluded using this calculation, meaning that Switzerland came out on top in Europe for the country with the most working hours.

According to this calculation, Switzerland’s average full-time working week was 42 hours and 33 minutes.

At the other end of the spectrum, Finland had the shortest working week in 2023, with 36 hours and 29 minutes.

But it’s not quite that simple.

If you look at the data overall – including those people who had absences – then you get a slightly different picture, and number: an average working week of 40 hours and 12 minutes.

The data also shows that, perhaps unsurprisingly, farmers work more than other working people, putting in an average of 44 hours and 23 minutes each week.

Construction workers, on the other hand, have the shortest working weeks, with 39 hours and 42 minutes of hard graft.

And the longer-term trend looks different, too: over the last five years, working hours have actually dropped.

Between 2018 and 2023, the actual weekly hours worked by full-time employees fell by 46 minutes on average, to 40 hours and 12 minutes. 

But these statistics still don’t tell the full story.

If we look at the data in another way, we get a different picture again.

For example, if you work out the hours worked based on the total number of employed (full- and part-time) people, Switzerland was one of the countries with the shortest actual working hours per week in 2023, with 35 hours and 30 minutes.

This is because Switzerland has lots of part-time workers.

Greece had the longest weekly working hours (39 hours and 48 minutes) and the Netherlands the shortest (30 hours and 33 minutes), while the EU average was 35 hours and 42 minutes.

If we change the parameters to look at the total volume of weekly working hours in relation to the total population (15 years and older), then because of its high employment rate, Switzerland’s back to being one of the countries with the longest actual weekly working hours, with 23 hours and 1 minute.

Iceland recorded the longest working hours here (25 hours and 31 minutes) and Italy the shortest (16 hours and 34 minutes). The EU average was 19 hours and 26 minutes.

Statistics, don’t you love them?