Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek (2025)

Towards the end of 2022, headlines began popping up trumpeting the arrival, at long last, of a new way of working. Business Insider’s, for example, read: “New Research May Have Just Paved the Way for the 4-Day Week.” The research in question was the first large-scale, independent pilot programs to test the impact of reducing the workweek to roughly 32 hours, without any reduction in pay.

Conducted by the non-profit organization 4 Day Week Global (4WDG), the two pilots were based on six-month trials that included 33 companies and a total of 903 employees, primarily in the U.S. and Ireland. They confirmed a thesis that has been gathering steam for a while: a shorter work week is better for both employees and employers.

“We knew the results were going to be good,” says Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of 4DWG. “The only thing that surprised us is that they were so good.” By almost every measure both employers and employees overwhelmingly judged the new schedule a success.

Upon thinking a little further, Lockhard recalled another surprise: “The statistic around how much you would have to pay people to go back to the old ways,” she said, referring to the nearly 42% who would need a 25-50% salary increase to return to a five-day work week. “And then there were the people who said they wouldn’t do it for any amount—’you just couldn’t pay me enough.’”

In February, 4 Day Week Global will release the results of an even bigger trial that was conducted last year in the United Kingdom. And independent of its pilots, hundreds of other companies and even governments are experimenting with and adopting the new schedule on their own.

Will 2023 be the year in which the 4-day work week becomes a reality? Here are reasons why some think it may:

The timing is finally right

The five-day week that most of us take as natural is actually less than 100 years old. Although British factories began in the late 19th century to tack a half day on Saturday to their workers’ day of rest on Sunday, the full two-day weekend as we know it was first adopted by an American mill in 1908, and didn’t become standard in the United States until the Great Depression.

Since then, a handful of countries and companies have made the work week shorter still. Although its legal requirement is 37 hours, Denmark’s average weekly total, for example, fell below 34 hours by 2002, and remains there to this day. But resistance to a more widespread transformation has long been the norm. “I published my first book on this in 1997,” says Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, who leads the research for 4 Day Week Global, “but back then was unable to find any companies willing to reduce their staff’s workload.” That began to change several years ago when a handful of companies began experimenting. “But nothing like what is happening now” Schor says. “Now, it’s actually a real thing.”

Chalk one up for the pandemic. Under lockdown, stress levels and burnout skyrocketed among workers struggling to keep up with their jobs while balancing the increased demands of domestic life, and helped fuel both frustration at workplace inefficiencies, and, in some sectors, mass resignations.

At the same time, many employers got firsthand evidence that their staff would keep up with work even when their work patterns changed. “The shift to remote work changed the way many employers started to think about scheduling,” says Schor, noting that the CEO of Healthwise, a Boise, Idaho healthcare company, told her the experience taught him he could trust his employees. And he wasn’t the only one.

“I think it was a real revelation to a lot of management that letting people work from home didn’t mean they wouldn’t work,” she says.

Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek (1)

It’s undeniably good for employees

For most of her career, Julieanne Cotter worked a normal five-day-per-week schedule. But earlier this year, she took a job as a manager with Rent a Recruiter, an Ireland-based international head-hunting company, where the Monday through Thursday work week it was trialing as part of 4 Day Week’s pilot was a major draw. She uses every Friday to care for both elderly relatives and for herself. “Maybe I’ll just spend some time outside in the park,” she says. “In terms of your mental health it can just be huge. It completely re-energizes you.”

Individual experiments around the globe—more than 30 companies in the U.S. have tried it—have long found that a four-day week makes workers happier. But the new report goes into more depth on exactly how. Job satisfaction was higher for over 45% of participants and 60% said it improved work-life balance. Although 16.7% of people said that having to fit work into a tighter schedule had increased their stress levels, nearly double that amount, at 32.4%, said their stress levels had gone down over the trial period. “There’s a higher energy level going in,” says Cotter. “Knowing that you’re not going in on Monday morning and not coming out until 6 or 7 in the evening on Friday—it just feels different.”

Part of the improvement has to do with how workers used their third day off. Like Cotter, many take advantage of it to spend time with their families; the percentage of participants who said they wish they had more time for childcare was nearly halved over the course of the study. Others used it for leisure activities and personal time, factors that, in the pilots, helped boost participants’ frequency of duration of exercise and decrease their fatigue and even insomnia.

Since joining Calibre Analytics, a tech company based in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year, software engineer Colby Swandale uses his third day off, he says, ”generally as a self-care day. I focus on my mental health and do activities like cycling, walks, and gym sessions.” And because Calibre adds its extra free day to the end of the weekend instead of the beginning (it operates on a Tuesday-Friday schedule), it has managed to banish the dreaded “Sunday Scaries.”

“I look forward to starting work each week,” Swandale says.

The one thing that workers didn’t use that extra day for? More work. “That was the biggest surprise,” says economist Schor about 2022 pilots, which overlapped with a period of spiraling inflation and the cost of living crisis. “No one used it to get a second job.”

It’s good for business

It doesn’t come as a shock that workers prefer an extra day off, and a shorter work week can be a powerful factor for attracting talent. That was the case for Swandale, who interviewed at several prominent tech firms before choosing Calibre. “The four-day week ultimately determined my decision to join the company,” he says.

At Rent a Recruiter, Cotter’s boss Barry Prost has found that the new schedule gives companies “a competitive advantage” when it comes to attracting talent. But the benefits for business don’t stop there. Among the reporting countries in the 4 Day Week study, revenues rose an average of 8.14% and increased a whopping 37.55% in comparison with the same period the previous year.

Since Search Intelligence Ltd, a digital PR company based outside Oxford, England, made its switch to a four-day week in May 2022 (it was not part of the pilot), productivity has “gone through the roof,” says owner and managing director Fery Kaszoni. Junior staffers at the company are expected to have three successful PR campaigns per month but before the switch often struggled to meet those targets. “Since May, every single person has hit their KPIs,” says Kaszoni. “Productivity has increased 25 or 30%.”

How? Improved efficiency is the main factor. Search Intelligence Ltd developed new software that streamlined internal processes, but the biggest gains came by cutting down on meetings. “We don’t do long meetings anymore,” Kaszoni says. “We used to have the onboarding Zoom meeting where 10 people from our team would meet the client and just sit there and listen for an hour. Now, we send them an email, and say, ‘these are the questions, please answer them.’ We’ve cut down massively on unnecessary things and it’s just been brilliant.”

Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek (2)

It’s probably good for the planet

Because there are so many variables, the exact impact of a four-day week on a business’ carbon footprint is difficult to measure. Many businesses have their energy use built into their office rent, so consumption is difficult to track and any offset there would need to be compared with any potential increase at workers’ homes. “I think the next step,” says Schor in reference to future studies, “is to see if people will upload their actual energy bills so we can look at the usage, and make seasonal adjustments.”

But one place where emissions seemed clearly reduced is in transportation. In the 4DWG study, commuting was somewhat reduced; the average time spent per week fell by nearly an hour. Cumulatively, that could mean big change. By lopping off a day of commuting, one British study found the U.K. would reduce car travel by 691 million miles per week.

Other studies have indicated that curbing work hours in high-income countries may result in lower consumption in general, which, in turn, reduces the carbon footprint. Another study in which Schor was involved found, for example, that a 10% reduction in hours equaled an 8.6% decline in the carbon footprint. “We don’t have a definitive finding yet,” Schor says now. “We just have some pieces of evidence that point in a good direction.”

Governments are paying attention

From 2015-2019, Iceland ran trials that reduced the workweek from 40 hours to 35 or 36 without a reduction in pay for 2,500 workers—or just over 1% of the country’s workforce. So successful was the experiment that once the results were published, unions began advocating for more widespread adoption, and by 2021, 86% of the country’s workers had either reduced their work week or had the right to do so.

Since then, other governments of various sizes have undertaken variations on the same switch. In 2019 the tiny municipality of Odsherred in Denmark switched its 300 public employees to a Monday-Thursday schedule (although without reducing their total hours overall), and in 2022, the UAE cut their work week for public employees to 4.5 days. In 2021 Spain announced the launch of a national trial and set aside 50 million euros to fund it, then began gradually rolling out the program in 2022. And in the spring of this year, Valencia—the country’s third-largest city—will roll out a creative, low-barrier-to-entry test of the four-day work week when it switches a holiday normally held in March to April, a month that, thanks to Easter and local festivities, already had three Fridays off.

But it’s true that efforts to shift to a four-day week through legislation have thus far run into obstacles that have diluted or blocked them. In May 2022, a bill before the California state legislature requiring companies with more than 500 employees to pay overtime after 32 hours a week stalled and has not been taken up again since. And while a reform that guarantees the right of employees to request a four-day schedule came into effect in Belgium in November 2022, that measure only compresses the work week rather than reducing it (employees must still work the same number of total hours as before).

“There was quite a big debate in Belgium in favor of a working time reduction, mostly among the trade unions and the feminist movement,” says Stan de Spiegelaere, a professor at Ghent University and director of policy for the union UNI Europa. “Now, it’s been buried. The political parties can say, ’we’ve done something—we made the four-day week possible.’ But this is not the four-day week we wanted.”

Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek (3)

There’s no going back

But even without broader legislation encouraging them to make the switch, the number of both companies and governments eager to try a four-day work week is growing. 4DWG is launching new pilot programs quarterly around the world in the coming year.

“The conversations are happening at a much greater speed,” says 4DWG’s Lockhart. “And the idea is no longer as unfamiliar as it used to be. I expect that by the end of 2023, it will be considered mainstream.”

If that’s true, it’s in large part because of how popular the change has been for the entities that try it. Of the companies in 4DWG’s 2022 trials, a full 93% said they would either definitely continue with the four-day week or were planning to, though they had not made a final decision.

That fits with Julieanne Cutter’s perspective. Now that the trial is over, her employer, Rent a Recruiter, is continuing with its four-day week, and she suspects it won’t be long before society as a whole makes the change.

“There are so many benefits, from companies trying to stay competitive in terms of acquiring talent, to employees having better mental health, that I think it’s inevitable,” she says. “I think it’s coming.”

Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek (2025)

FAQs

Will the US ever have a four-day work week? ›

Is the U.S. on the cusp of a big shift to four-day workweeks? No. Of the 482 managers at firms that don't currently offer four-day workweeks, two-thirds said there is no chance their firms will offer them by the end of 2024. The other one-third say the chances are only 16 percent, on average.

What does the four-day workweek mean for the future of work? ›

Higher productivity

Limiting work to just four days per week could encourage employees to better prioritize their assignments. In other words, a worker could put more effort into tasks they have less time to complete. Keep in mind this also could intensify their stress, especially in high-risk, competitive businesses.

What are the disadvantages of a 4-day work week? ›

One of the most common disadvantages of a 4-day work week is balancing shifts. If you're a Monday to Friday business, staying that way gets a bit more complicated. Depending on your workplace, certain days of the week might be more hotly contested than others.

Why do we need a four-day week? ›

The general theory behind a shorter week is that happier, more fulfilled employees are therefore more focused on their job when actually in the workplace. Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand firm trialled a four day week. The results found that 78% of employees could more effectively balance their work and home life.

How does a 4-day work week affect the economy? ›

Results from a 2022 six-month four-day week trial promoted by campaign group 4 Day Week Global and involving 61 companies in the UK showed that they saw an increase in their average revenues, while 71% of employees reported a decrease in burnout, according to a report.

How many hours is a 4-day work week? ›

Variations. Most advocates for a four-day working week argue for a fixed work schedule, resulting in shorter weeks (e.g. four 8-hour workdays for a total of 32 hours). This follows the 100-80-100 model: 100% pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least 100% productivity.

Which country now has a 4-day work week? ›

Belgium became the first country in Europe to legislate for a four-day week. In February 2022, Belgian employees won the right to perform a full workweek in four days instead of the usual five without loss of salary.

Which state is considering 4-day work week? ›

Are any other US states considering a 4-day workweek? Some US states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, are interested in implementing a shorter workweek after seeing its success in the UK trials.

What are the results of the 4-day work week? ›

Nearly half (46%) said working and productivity improved. The report's author, Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, said the results showed “real and long lasting” effects. “Physical and mental health, and work-life balance are significantly better than at six months.

What is the promise of a 4-day work week? ›

Unlocking Productivity

The compressed workweek encourages individuals to prioritize tasks and streamline processes, ultimately leading to greater output and accomplishments. The growing enthusiasm for the 4-day workweek reflects a shifting mindset toward prioritizing both employee well-being and productivity.

What would a four day work week look like? ›

A four-day workweek is a fairly straightforward work flexibility concept. Rather than working a standard 40-hour workweek across five working days, employees work fewer hours (typically 32 to 36 hours per week) across four working days. Employees get a three-day weekend every week.

Who benefits from a 4-day work week? ›

Pilot studies in countries including the U.K., Spain, Portugal, and South Africa suggest that shorter workweeks can help employees reduce burnout, manage stress, get more sleep and exercise, spend additional quality time with loved ones, and feel all-around happier and healthier.

Are people happier with the 4-day work week? ›

Employees' physical and mental health improves when organizations embrace a shorter workweek. Research shows people are less stressed, value their jobs more, and have better lives outside of work. Job satisfaction and employee engagement increase.

Does 4-day work week mean less money? ›

What could a four-day work week mean for my paycheck? Here's the good news: If you're a salaried employee, a four-day work week would likely mean you get more time off while receiving the same pay. In other words, no change to your regular paycheck. If you're an hourly employee, here could be changes to overtime pay.

Why employers should consider a four-day work week these reasons could make a four-day work week worth considering? ›

Helps Achieve Work-Life Balance and Reduces Stress

This adversely affects mental and physical health. Several studies have shown that transitioning to a four-day week dramatically reduces employee stress while enabling better work-life balance through greater schedule control.

Why is a 4-day work week better for the environment? ›

If organisations adopt a 4 day working week, the daily head count in the office drops by approximately 20% and the number of cars on the road drops by at least a fifth. It's a win-win-win scenario for employees, employers and the environment.

Why the four-day week is not the solution to modern work stress? ›

The irony is that the four-day work week expects even more daily time spent at the office than a traditional work week, only to reward that time with an extra day off. Outside of work people will gain more freedom and flexibility, but inside work, employees will still feel chained to their desk.

What country is trying a 4-day work week? ›

Belgium introduces a four-day workweek for employees who want it. Belgium became the first country in Europe to legislate for a four-day week. In February 2022, Belgian employees won the right to perform a full workweek in four days instead of the usual five without loss of salary.

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