Key Details
Global Working Hours, a World Bank working paper, draws on about 2,600 labour surveys from 160 countries, including India. Its central measure is hours worked per adult, so it captures both the length of the working week and the share of people in employment.
Employed adults work about 42 hours a week worldwide. Averaged across all adults, including those not employed, the figure is about 25 hours.
Hours per adult fall only slightly as countries grow richer. Income explains little of the variation between countries.
Women perform 35% of work hours counted in GDP. Their lower share is driven mainly by lower employment, not dramatically shorter hours among those employed.
The dataset also follows working-time trends over at least 20 years in 86 countries.
More Income Has Not Meant Much Less Work
Higher incomes are often assumed to bring shorter working weeks. The global pattern is much weaker. Hours worked by adults aged 20–59 remain broadly stable across levels of development, even as the economy changes around them. In many middle-income countries, a move from agriculture into manufacturing and market services brings workers into jobs with longer hours, before working weeks tend to shorten at higher income levels.
The Bigger Shift Is in Who Works
Young people work less where more remain in education. Older people work less where pensions provide wider, meaningful coverage. Among prime-age adults, employed men tend to work fewer hours while more women enter employment. Those changes largely balance out in the total.
The gender figures need one distinction: the main measure counts work contributing to GDP but not unpaid cooking, cleaning or care. It describes a shift in measured economic work, not the whole of women’s and men’s workload.
India Changes the Weight of the Global Comparison
India’s 2023 labour-force data help fill a major gap in earlier international comparisons: India and China together account for roughly 35% of the world’s population. India also illustrates that education need not wait for high incomes. Secondary-school enrolment had reached about 80% by 2010, at an income level where France historically had far lower enrolment.
The findings offer a lens on India’s labour market, not an India-specific estimate of what a change to pension or working-time rules would achieve.
Policy Relevance
For India, the useful question is not simply whether the average working week rises or falls. Hours per worker show how long employed people work; hours per adult also reflect who gets work. Reading both alongside women’s employment, school attendance and pension coverage gives a clearer account of change.
Working-time protections matter, but their reach depends on formal employment and enforcement. The international associations between regulations, social spending and shorter hours do not establish that any one measure would produce the same result in India.
Follow the Full Paper Here: Global Working Hours, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper