Spain Long Working Hours Rate (2025)

The Spain Long Working Hours Rate measures the share of employed persons aged 15 and over who usually work 49 or more hours per week in their main job, published annually by Eurostat from the EU Labour Force Survey (dataset LFSA_QOE_4A6R2). At 3.9% in 2025 — unchanged from 2018 and 1.7 percentage points above the EU-27 average of 2.2% — Spain is an outlier in this group, with a long-hours rate nearly 8× Italy's and well above Germany's and France's.

Spain's above-average long working hours rate is rooted in three structural features of its labour market. First, self-employment is more prevalent in Spain than in northern Europe — approximately 16% of the workforce — and self-employed persons are not subject to the same statutory working-time limits that apply to employees, nor do they face the same incentive structures (overtime premiums, collective agreement caps) that discourage very long hours for employees. Second, Spain's hospitality and retail sectors — large due to tourism's weight in GDP — are characterised by long trading hours and a working pattern that extends the day well into the evening, particularly in tourist areas. Third, the Spanish culture of extended working hours is deeply embedded: the traditional two-to-three-hour midday break (comida) followed by an afternoon-evening work session structurally extends the hours over which work occurs, even if total actual hours may not be dramatically higher than northern European equivalents in some cases.

For ESG analysts assessing CSRD social indicator disclosures of Spanish companies, the 3.9% long-hours rate establishes a national benchmark. Companies with high concentrations of hospitality, retail, or self-employed contracted workers in Spain are likely to report above-benchmark long working hours. Under CSRD's mandatory social indicators (S1 — Own workforce), employers must disclose working hours and work-life balance metrics; the Eurostat series provides the country reference against which reported figures should be contextualised. Spain's government has proposed reducing the standard statutory workweek from 40 to 37.5 hours — if enacted, this would likely reduce the share working 49+ hours marginally by changing the baseline against which "usual hours" are measured.

Coverage and methodology: Eurostat's LFS measures usual hours in the main job from self-reported survey responses. Spain's INE provides the underlying EPA data. The series begins in 2018. Spain's high self-employment and informal sector — while smaller than Italy's — means that actual total labour input (including second jobs and informal work) may exceed measured hours for a segment of the workforce, particularly in agriculture, construction, and domestic services.