7 Facts about our work week

This article uses Labour Force Survey (LFS) data available in TableBuilder and the Longitudinal Labour Force Survey microdata to explore our understanding of the modern work week and how it may have changed over the past ten years.

The proportion of part-timers working three or four days a week has grown 6 per cent over the last ten years.  

Full-time workers are now working less days. The proportion of full-timers working more than five days a week has dropped 5 percent over the last ten years. 

There are around 203,000 over 65 year olds working weekends, this is 40 per cent more than there were ten years ago. 

Meanwhile there are 57,000 less people aged between 45 and 54 years working on weekends compared to ten years ago. This is despite the employed population growing 9 per cent in that time.

Figures show how hard we work is mostly based on life stage rather than generation group. Gen Z, currently aged 15-29 years old, work on average 28 hours a week. Millennials worked a similar average of 30 hours a week at the same age back in 2010.

It’s the same story for older workers. Both Gen X and Baby Boomers worked on average 7.3 hours a day when they were between the ages of 45 and 64.

On average 512,000 Victorians who would normally work are taking the day off on that first Tuesday in November. That’s only 60 per cent of all employed in Victoria working compared to an average of 78 per cent across the rest of Australia.

Weekdays are for work. For every one person working on a Sunday, there were five working on a Wednesday.

This means that around 11 million of us work during the week, in particular on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. 

There are 170,000 more women working on weekends compared to ten years ago. The number of women working on a weekday has risen by 1.2 million in that same time. 

The number of males working on weekends rose by 55,000 over the last ten years, and weekday workers grew by just over 1 million.

Multiple job-holders squeeze in almost six more hours per week than their single-job counterparts - despite both groups working on average 4 days a week. This is consistent across full-time and part-time workers. 

• The Labour Force Survey (LFS) collects information about the days respondents work in a week and is available in our LFS TableBuilder and Longitudinal LFS Microdata products.
• The LFS uses reference weeks so that all households completing a survey for a particular month are thinking about the same period of time when answering questions. See our Data Item Guide for more information about reference periods in the LFS.
• The reference period can influence what days of the week a person has worked, in particular whether there has been a public holiday in that week. This can cause fluctuations in the data for certain months. 12 month averages have been used in this analysis to account for these differences. The data end date used is November 2025.
• Multiple job-holder information is also available in Multiple job-holders, published quarterly using multiple sources including the LFS.
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