There’s a quiet trend running underneath the modern economy, and most people have stopped noticing it because it’s been happening for so long: the average person works fewer hours than they used to. Not dramatically less, not all at once, but steadily, decade after decade, in country after country. And if you’re building something — a company, a product, a career on your own terms — that slow drift downward is one of the more interesting tailwinds available to you.
The trend is real, and it’s old
Working hours have been falling since the Industrial Revolution. In the late 1800s, employees in industrialized economies often worked well over fifty hours a week, sometimes closer to sixty. By 1990, average annual hours in developed economies had roughly halved. That decline didn’t stop. OECD data shows that across most member countries, hours worked per capita kept sliding between 2019 and 2024, continuing a pattern that predates the pandemic. About a quarter of the total reduction in annual hours worked since 2005 happened in just those last five years.
The numbers today tell a clear story. The average actual working week across the EU sits around 36 hours, with countries like the Netherlands closer to 32. Even the United States, which works longer hours than most of its peers, has seen its average drift down over the long run compared to the postwar decades. This isn’t a story about one country or one industry. It’s a structural shift in how much of the week most people spend at work.
Why it’s happening
A few forces are pulling in the same direction. Rising productivity means fewer hours are needed to produce the same output, so as economies get richer, people tend to trade some of that extra output for more free time rather than working the same hours for higher pay. Labor regulations in much of the world have steadily ratcheted toward shorter weeks, more vacation days, and stronger limits on overtime. Cultural attitudes toward work-life balance have shifted too, especially among younger workers entering the labor force. None of these forces look like they’re about to reverse.
What this means if you’re building something
Here’s the part that matters if you’re an entrepreneur, a freelancer, or just someone trying to get ahead. If the average competitor — another founder, another company, another professional in your field — is working somewhere in the 32 to 40 hour range, then simply choosing to work more than that isn’t a moral statement about hustle culture. It’s a measurable, compounding advantage. Two extra hours a day, sustained over a year, adds up to hundreds of additional hours of building, learning, and iterating that the average person across most developed economies isn’t putting in.
This isn’t a claim that working more hours automatically makes you better at what you do, or that burnout is something to chase. Output and hours aren’t the same thing, and plenty of people work long hours badly. But all else being equal — same skill, same market, same starting resources — extra focused hours are extra reps. Extra reps mean more shots at the version of the product that actually works, more conversations with customers, more iterations on the thing that’s broken. In a world where the baseline expectation for how much time people spend working keeps shrinking, choosing not to shrink with it is one of the few advantages still available to anyone, regardless of funding, connections, or background.
The caveat worth taking seriously
The flip side of this is worth saying plainly. A shrinking average workweek is also evidence that long hours stop paying off past a certain point — that’s part of why people have collectively chosen to work less as they’ve gotten richer. Sustained overwork has real costs: diminishing returns on focus, decision quality, and health, and a well-documented relationship with burnout. The advantage isn’t in working endlessly. It’s in being one of the people still willing to put in a serious, focused effort while the average keeps drifting toward less. That’s a much smaller, much more sustainable bet than working yourself into the ground — and it’s also one you can actually keep making for years instead of months.The workweek isn’t shrinking by accident, and it’s not going to reverse itself. For anyone building something from scratch, that’s not a reason to worry about falling behind a culture of leisure. It’s a reason to notice that the bar for outworking the field keeps getting a little lower every year.