France Long Working Hours Rate (2025)

The France 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 2.4% in 2025 — down from 2.8% in 2018 and flat year-on-year — France sits marginally above the EU-27 average of 2.2%, a result that surprises many observers given France's statutory 35-hour workweek.

The seemingly paradoxical result is explained by how France's working-time law actually applies. The loi Aubry (2000) mandating a 35-hour standard workweek applies to the majority of employees on standard contracts (ouvriers, employés, and technicians). However, France's legal framework includes two major categories of exemption that capture a significant share of the workforce. Cadres dirigeants (senior executives) are entirely excluded from working-time regulations. Cadres autonomes and certain professional workers may operate under a forfait jours régime — a system that counts annual working days (typically 218) rather than weekly hours, effectively removing the 35-hour ceiling for this cohort. INSEE and DARES estimate that approximately 40% of France's cadre workforce operates under forfait jours. The self-employed are also outside statutory hour limits. These exempt populations, combined with France's relatively large professional and managerial class, are sufficient to keep the 49+ hours rate near the EU average.

For ESG analysts and institutional investors applying CSRD-aligned social screening, France's long working hours rate requires reading alongside the sectoral composition of a target company's workforce. A French company with a predominantly white-collar, high-cadre workforce will likely have a higher actual long-hours incidence than the economy-wide 2.4% headline; a predominantly blue-collar workforce will typically sit below it. CSRD's workplace wellbeing disclosures will increasingly require companies to report disaggregated working hours data, making the Eurostat series a useful economy-wide anchor for materiality assessments.

Coverage and methodology: Eurostat's LFS collects usual weekly hours from employed respondents' self-reports. The 49-and-over threshold is distinct from the EU Working Time Directive's 48-hour average cap (which allows some weekly variation). France does not extensively use the Working Time Directive's individual opt-out (Article 22), which in principle could allow workers to voluntarily agree to exceed 48 average hours — the forfait jours system is France's distinctive national mechanism that achieves a similar effect for professional workers without invoking the opt-out. The series begins in 2018, limiting long-run trend analysis; the EWCS (European Working Conditions Survey) provides complementary qualitative data with longer history.