Iceland approved 4-day workweek in 2019; six years later, predictions came true
35 comments
·May 13, 2025VSerge
wiz21c
I concur: participating in household stuff (being men or women) is a huge thing. When you have kids, you have sometimes to meet the teachers, go to a doctor, do some adminsitrative work. Having a day for that (even if working a bit more the other days) adds flexibility for these tasks to be much bearable
harperlee
Yes but if the whole country is on that schema, then your options to deal with teachers, doctors or public workers on the free day tend to disappear. Case in point: countries where Saturdays used to be a working day, and where you also had school for kids on Saturday (France and Spain, if I'm not mistaken).
VSerge
Looking at the link shared in another comment with the actual study, it seems that only 55% of private sector workers are happy with the new arrangement, and that higher satisfaction rates are in the public sector. I am a bit skeptical about some of the conclusions of the report saying for example that the private sector needs to take more inspiration from the public sector, which seems blissfully unaware that the private sector can't rely on tax revenue to pay salaries, and has a very different set of operating constraints.
referring to this: https://autonomy.work/portfolio/on-firmer-ground-icelands-on...
j45
It makes a case for considering what the work day really is (number of hours given in a day towards work, including commute).
If a greater number of people could access 36h work weeks at 9h a day, and more people got access to 4 day work weeks, with a long weekend every weekend, it might not be a bad thing.
meigwilym
I would love for this to be true, but who is the Farmingdale Observer to make these claims? A quick search suggests it's a small town American newspaper.
No sources cited in the text, a quote from an "activist". It's not much to go on.
0xEF
A simple search shows that this is widely reported. Here's a BBC link: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57724779
meigwilym
Thanks!
greybox
This article simply has it's facts wrong. I live and work in Iceland as a software engineer, I work a ~37hr week and work 5 days a week. Local councils tried a 4-day work week a few years ago and ended up not implementing it.
I'm not sure where they are getting their numbers from.
pixxel
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coreyh14444
I don't know about Iceland's work culture, but I can say as an American working in Denmark I've noticed that while Danes work FAR fewer hours than I'm used to, especially in startup culture, they tend to be extremely focused while at work. Nobody does their online shopping or reads news (cough cough what I'm doing now) while at work. In my old coworking space, a woman did CAD work and I never once saw anything other CAD open on her computer.
Eddy_Viscosity2
I think this all shows that for many, but definitely not all, jobs there is a finite amount of productive time that people have to give. You can make people be at the office for crazy hours (looking at you japan), but you don't actually squeeze that much more useful work out of people. I think this is especially true of work that requires alot of mental focus like problem solving or other creative type work. Much of that happens in down-time where your mind is working on it behind the scenes. That's why people have breakthroughs when going for a walk or taking a shower. So the 'down-time' is just as important as the active time. Similar to physical exercise - the recovery phase is as important than the exertion phase.
readthenotes1
There's some report years ago that said that in the United States people work about 25 hours and a 40-hour work week.
Not only are there the usual distractions of chatting with friends and playing games, there's also the fact that taking care of personal life has to happen sometime during the 9-5.
eadmund
> Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours, compared with 40 hours previously, with no loss of pay.
> Unlike some countries, such as Belgium, where the four-day week means that hours not worked are compensated for by longer working days
40 hours/5 days = 8 hours per day
36 hours/4 days = 9 hours per day
The Icelandic workday increased from 8 to 9 hours, a 12½% increase. That sure looks like hours not worked being compensated for by longer working days.
0xEF
The difference between 8 and 9 hour days is negligible, in my experience. I typically do four 10-hour days here in the US, leaving me a fifth day that either stays free on my schedule, or is open for 100% overtime pay if there is extra work at my job.
When I started, I was on five 8-hour days with the possibility of working half days on Saturday if things were hectic. It made me extremely prone to burnout because I never got enough time to reset.
Depending on the demands of one's job, the four 9/10-hour days may work or may not. For me, working 8 hours then commuting home meant I was going to spend what remained of my weekday evenings decompressing, getting nothing done at home or with my hobbies because I was drained from the day. Switching to 9, then 10's made zero difference on those wasted days, but granted me 1.5 extra days (free day + no more possible half-day Saturdays) where I typically can do whatever I want. I am lucky enough to be able to drop that free day on Friday or Monday, so I get tons of three day weekends to spend with my wife and various hobbies.
If you focus on the hours per day, it stops making as much sense for some. I find folly in that. I look at days per week. If I am working 5 days per week, because of burnout, those five days are no longer mine. Not much else is getting done. If I am only working 4 days, still moving the same output with the same paycheck, but I'm getting more of my time per week back, which allows me to reset and enjoy the things I enjoy.
Again, this won't work for everyone. Each of us has to be honest about what we'd really do with an extra hour or two in the day, versus an extra day in the week, then decide what works best for us.
secretsatan
That's a bit pedantic, trying to describe an overall decrease as an increase takes a real stretch
b800h
So they're moving to a 36-hour work week, which is actually an hour longer than some Britons who work a 35-hour week over five days.
mertbio
I work 32 hours per week and I can't imagine myself working 40 hours per week anymore. I should have reduced earlier. Together with starting to work at 8AM, I have so much time in the afternoon for myself.
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petesergeant
Does anyone have a better source? This seems to be blogspam based on a (linked) Spanish article that seems to be a partial translation of a Guardian opinion piece but I’m hoping there’s a real paper or findings somewhere?
Edit: this seems to be the study that various articles are based on https://autonomy.work/portfolio/on-firmer-ground-icelands-on...
input_sh
Here, much better than this LLM-written blog spam:
https://autonomy.work/portfolio/on-firmer-ground-icelands-on...
petesergeant
Apologies, I think I found it at about the same time as you and updated my comment before I’d seen yours!
dosinga
Thanks for that. This study is much more nuanced and does not really concur with the conclusions from the article at all. The article says:
Today, almost 90% of Icelandic workers benefit from a reduced working week of 36 hours
The offer of shorter hours has been widespread. In the two years prior to being surveyed, more than half (59%) of workers were offered reduced working hours.
petesergeant
I don't think you're missing anything. It was interesting to me that there didn't seem to be any measured outcomes other than "how was this rolled out?" and "how do workers feel about it?"
laserlight
Agreed. It's difficult to take the article seriously when the text is interspersed with links to other articles, such as “Close the Toilet Lid Now! This Is What Actually Happens When You Flush the Toilet”.
sublimefire
It is more of an opinion piece due to missing numbers and percentages. I am not denying the effectiveness of a 4 day week but this is not an article to use for a good discussion.
scotty79
An opinion piece with numbers is still an opinion piece. If you want to see what was actually found out, read the research (if available).
hnbad
Anecdotally, we introduced a 25 hours (5 days, 5 hours per day) work week at full pay in our company (digital services, creative) and maintained it for several years and observed a reduction of productivity (in terms of output) of 10-20% compared to the reduction of working hours of 37.5%. We also saw much higher employee satisfaction and self-reported mental health improvements. Most of the employees were women so the reduction in working hours also often translated to a significant relative increase in leisure time as much of their non-working hours was otherwise taken up by family, care work and chores (which isn't to say their partners were slobs but gendered expectations still exist in our society and it's not just the men reinforcing them).
Our biggest problem was that this was difficult to roll out to all people working for the company. E.g. you can't really cut the hours for cleaners coming in for a few hours per week because their hours are mostly defined by their workload and a 37.5% reduction across the board also means someone who previously did 20 hours would now do 12.5 hours, which translates to a much greater loss of productivity if spread out across more than two days. The founders also pretty much kept working full time as before.
The reduced number of working hours also really put the spotlight on people who were already struggling with productivity before, which one might argue is a good thing. Also for legal reasons the contracts remained unaffected as this was an open-ended experiment, not a legally binding benefit. The employees were also interviewed before and during the process and most were initially opposed to the idea because they feared they wouldn't be able to handle their workloads in less time.
It's worth mentioning that just like WFH policies, this is something that simply doesn't work for everyone. If you have a factory with a fixed output over time and productivity of an employee is tied to time at the machine, productivity loss will translate 1-to-1 from reduced working hours. Likewise in retail working hours are dictated by opening hours. You can still reduce working hours by introducing/adding shifts of course but there is no economic incentive for companies to keep paying employees the same for fewer hours in these jobs unless coerced to do so through collective bargaining. Remember that while many credit Henry Ford with popularizing the 40 hour work week and he did provide many rationalizations for it at his own company, the 40 hour work week only became law (along with many other improvements of working conditions) after massive protests from unionists and anarchists, including the Haymarket massacre[0]. It wasn't simply handed to workers, and certainly not voluntarily.
[0]: In case you're unfamiliar with the term, the Haymarket massacre or "Haymarket affair" refers to an incident where police shot and killed an unknown number of unarmed protestors and striking workers following an explosion that killed seven police officers and at least four workers. Eight people were charged and sentenced (seven being sentenced to death) for the bombing, though it's not clear if any of them were actually involved in the bombing itself or its planning. The police officers who had shot and killed protestors never suffered any consequences.
bigintmike
The emphasis they put on internet infrastructure made me think that perhaps people also work more from home and might not properly count that toward work time.
Can't help but notice that their reduced 4-days work week still is 36h long. 9h work days would be considered long in most European countries, where the norm is around 40h for a five-days work week. So they are not just cutting a day, they are also working 1 hour more than average on each other day. This probably explains a lot in terms of productivity.
On a different note, the increased ability of men to participate in family life and household chores sounds amazing. It might sound weird to younger professionals without kids, but as soon as you have a child, having one extra day to deal with everything household related makes a huge difference.