Japan Works Fewer Hours Than the US. Only on Average

The average worker in Japan put in 1,617 hours in 2024. The average American worker put in 1,796. Those are OECD figures, and they have been pointing the same way for a quarter of a century. Most people outside Japan refuse to believe them. They are right to hesitate, though for a different reason than they think. The number is accurate. It just averages together people who have very little in common.

Who is in the 1,617 hours?

Everyone who works. Full-time employees, part-timers, the self-employed, and the person who does eight hours a week at a convenience store all count as one worker each. The OECD series, reproduced in the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training's Databook of International Labour Statistics 2026, shows Japan falling from 2,031 hours in 1990 to 1,821 in 2000, 1,733 in 2010 and 1,617 in 2024. The United States barely moved: 1,878 in 1990, 1,796 in 2024. The two lines crossed in the mid-1990s and Japan has been below ever since.

The OECD attaches a warning to this table. The data are built for tracking each country over time. Sources and methods differ, so the level in any given year should not be compared across countries. Germany's 1,331 hours is a good illustration: a very large part-time share pulls the average down. So "Japan works 179 hours less than America" is a sentence the OECD itself would not write.

What the OECD will stand behind is the trend. Japan lost more than 400 hours per worker in a little over 30 years. Most of it traces back to one change.

Japan's average fell because the part-time share doubled

Japan's labor ministry splits its Monthly Labour Survey (establishments with five or more employees) into regular workers, which is close to full-time, and part-time workers. The 2026 White Paper on Preventing Karoshi, approved by the cabinet in October 2026, lays out the long series.

Total annual hours for all employees in the survey, part-timers included, fell from 1,910 in 1995 to 1,621 in 2025. Take only regular workers and the fall is from 2,036 hours in 1994 to 1,926 in 2025, about 110 hours or five percent in 31 years. Part-time workers went from 1,172 hours to 949. And the share of part-time workers in the workforce rose from 14.4 percent in 1994 to 31.3 percent in 2025.

So the headline average dropped by nearly 290 hours while the typical full-time employee's year shrank by 110. Most of the rest is composition. The white paper gives two reasons for the decline: work-style reform, and more older people joining the workforce on short hours.

So do Japanese full-timers still work too much?

Less than they used to, and less than the stereotype. Regular workers have been under 2,000 hours a year since 2019, seven years running. Overtime in 2025 was 158 hours for the year, 13.2 hours a month, down two percent from 2024.

For the long tail you need a different survey. The Statistics Bureau's Labour Force Survey asks people themselves. The share of employees working 60 hours or more a week peaked at 12.2 percent in 2003 and 2004 and has fallen since, to 4.2 percent in 2025, or 2.53 million people. That denominator is all employees including part-timers. Among those working at least 40 hours a week, the share is 7.7 percent. The white paper adds that for men the rate is highest in the 30s and 40s, with the 40s on top since 2021, and that for women it is highest at 60 and over. By industry, transport and postal services, hotels and restaurants, and education had the highest shares.

So Japan has 2.5 million people working 60-hour weeks, concentrated among men in their 30s and 40s in a handful of industries. In a country averaging 1,617 hours, they are invisible. In a country averaging 1,926, they are still invisible.

Change the ruler and the ranking flips

By average hours Japan is below the US. By the share of people working long weeks, it is above.

The same JILPT databook, using ILOSTAT and the Labour Force Survey, gives the share of workers doing 49 or more hours a week in 2024: Japan 14.2 percent, Korea 15.0, the United States 11.4, the United Kingdom 8.9, France 8.1, Germany 4.4. For men only, Japan is at 20.4 percent against 15.3 in the US.

There is no contradiction. Japan has a lot of people on short hours and a lot of people on long hours. Both ends are thick, so the average comes out lower than America's. The US has more people in the middle, which gives it a longer average and a thinner tail.

"Japanese people work less than Americans" and "Japan has a long-hours problem" are both true, from the same data. Which one you say depends on whether you looked at the mean or the tail.

How I answer the question

When someone from head office asks whether Japanese employees still work late, I ask which Japanese employees they mean.

If they mean the national average including part-timers, the answer is fewer hours than Americans. If they mean the full-time staff they are about to hire, the answer is about 1,926 hours a year with roughly 13 hours of overtime a month, and the 2,000-hour line was crossed downward in 2019. If they mean a man in his 40s in logistics, food service or education, a meaningful share of that group is still past 60 hours a week. All of those are correct. The second one is usually the one they need, so I give it first.

It matters for how you run a Japan entity. The hours you promise in a job offer, the overtime ceiling you file in the Article 36 agreement, the output you expect per person: candidates are not benchmarking you against the OECD's 1,617. They are comparing you with what people of their age in their industry actually work. If you design the operation on the premise that Japan is a low-hours country, the load tends to land on a few specific people, and it disappears into that 4.2 percent.

One more caveat. The 1,926 figure comes from employers' records. The Labour Force Survey comes from workers' own answers, and the two disagree about overtime by a wide margin. I went through that gap in Overtime in Japan: 13 hours a month, or 21?, so I will not repeat it here. Just remember that 1,926 is the payroll number.

The reading method is the one in Japan by the Numbers: Check Who Was Counted. Who is in the denominator, who is left out, and whether you are looking at a mean or a distribution. Skip that step and the same table will support opposite conclusions.

What I still cannot read from these numbers is the fall in part-timers' own hours, from 1,172 to 949. If it means more people in their 60s and 70s working a short week by choice, that is a good change. If it means more people who want full-time work and cannot get it, it is a different story. The average and the distribution do not settle that.