New data from Germany‘s federal statistics office (Destatis) has shown that full-time employees worked an average of 39.9 hours per week in 2025, down marginally from 40.5 hours in 2015.
On a year-on-year basis, i.e. compared to 2024, the weekly working hours of full-time employees have not changed, the data showed.
At the same time, part-time employees worked longer hours last year compared to a decade earlier, averaging 21.3 hours per week in 2025 compared with 19.3 hours in 2015.
Overall, employees in Germany worked an average of 34 hours per week last year, marginally lower than ten years ago.
Workforce participation
The figures come amid an ongoing debate in Germany around labour shortages and the need to expand workforce participation and productivity in response to demographic pressures and skills shortages, Destatis noted.
Part-time employment continued to rise in 2025, with 31.9% of employees working part-time – the highest level recorded to date.
Women remained significantly more likely to work part-time than men. More than half of female employees (50.6%) worked part-time in 2025, compared with 14.3% of men, the data showed.
Among parents aged 25 to 49, the gap was even more pronounced. Nearly two-thirds of employed mothers with children under 18 worked part-time, compared with fewer than one in ten fathers in the same age group.
The data also showed that part-time work becomes increasingly common at older ages. Among employed 65-year-olds, more than half worked part-time, while over 90% of employed 70-year-olds were working reduced hours. Read more here.
