To the proponents of a four-day week, there is almost no problem in modern life which the idea can’t solve — or at least ameliorate. Burnout? Tick. Gender inequality? Tick. Unemployment? Tick. Carbon emissions? Tick.
Conversely, opponents see only problems: reduced economic output, damaged business competitiveness, strained public services and a weakened work ethic.
But rather than argue over these predictions, or nitpick over the results of trials in individual businesses, why not look to the country that has already gone a long way down this road, without the rest of the world really noticing?
The Netherlands has the highest rate of part-time working in the OECD. Average weekly working hours for people aged between 20 and 64 in their main job are just 32.1, the shortest in the EU, according to Eurostat.
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It has also become increasingly common for full-time workers to compress their hours into four days rather than spread them over five, says Bert Colijn, an economist at Dutch bank ING. “The four-day work week has become very, very common,” he told me. “I do work five days, and sometimes I get scrutinised for working five days!”
It all started with women. The Netherlands had a traditional male breadwinner model until women started to join the labour force in part-time roles in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, leading to what many called a “one-and-a-half” earner model. The tax and benefit system incentivised this arrangement.
Over time, as these working patterns became normalised, working part-time has become more popular with men too, especially when they have young children.
How can the experience of the Netherlands inform the debate in other countries? For a start, it suggests the predictions of economic self-harm are overdone. In spite of its shorter average working hours per person, the Netherlands is one of the richest economies in the EU in terms of GDP per head.
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That is because shorter working hours are combined with relatively high productivity per hour, and a high proportion of people in employment: 82 per cent of working-age people in the Netherlands were in employment at the end of 2024, according to OECD data, compared with 75 per cent in the UK, 74.7 per cent in Ireland, 72 per cent in the US, and 69 per cent in France.
Women, in particular, have high employment rates in the Netherlands, especially compared with countries like the US, where average working hours are longer. In addition, people in the Netherlands tend to retire fairly late.
It’s not that the population isn’t industrious, then — it’s rather that the work is spread out more across the population and the life course.
That said, it hasn’t led to equality between the sexes. Although it is becoming more common for children to have a “papa day” when the father does the childcare, rates of part-time working are still much higher for women.
And although working part-time doesn’t mean having to accept a low-paid or insecure job in the Netherlands, it does still appear to hold back women’s careers. A report by the OECD in 2019 found that the Netherlands “performs poorly” in some dimensions of gender equality. Only 27 per cent of managers were women, for example — one of the lowest rates in the OECD.
The economy also suffers from labour shortages, especially in sectors such as teaching. This can lead to a vicious circle, whereby a staff shortage makes school hours more chaotic and unpredictable, which makes it harder for parents to commit to longer working schedules, even if they want to.
But there are no easy answers when it comes to education and care. If everyone worked a five-day week, there would be a requirement for many more childcare and elderly care workers, because fewer people would be available to care for their own families.
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Colijn’s view is that the Netherlands is, in theory, holding itself back by working fewer hours. On the other hand, he adds, “I also wouldn’t want to propose any dystopian society where everyone is working more than Korean hours, just because it increases GDP.”
The experience of the Netherlands suggests that a four-day week isn’t nirvana. But nor is it a fast-track ticket to economic ruin.
The real lesson, I think, is that it is perfectly possible to arrange and distribute work in many different ways. It is just about the trade-offs you are willing to make, both within the economic realm and beyond it.
Speaking of going beyond economics, one underplayed argument for the four-day week is surely this: children in the Netherlands rank as the happiest in the rich world. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
