4-Day Workweek Countries and Companies Adopting It
Iceland, Belgium, Spain and hundreds of pilot employers have tested shorter weeks — here is how to find that work, and how to ask for it yourself.
By Daniel Ortiz · Sep 29, 2026 · 12 min read
Iceland, Belgium and Spain have moved furthest at government level on the four-day week, and hundreds of private employers now run one after coordinated pilots by 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week Foundation and the Autonomy Institute. Most of that work sits in software, marketing, professional services, charities and parts of the public sector, and almost all of it was negotiated employer by employer rather than handed down by law.
This guide covers what a four-day week actually looks like in a working week, how to get into a job that has one or build the case at your current employer, the skills that make it stick, and what happens to pay and progression.
What a 4-Day Workweek Countries and Companies Adopting It does
A four-day week is not simply the same job with a day removed. Where it works, the week has been redesigned. Day to day, people on one tend to:
- Run shorter, fewer meetings with written agendas, and decline or convert meetings to a document by default — this is usually the first thing a pilot cuts.
- Write a handover note before their non-working day in Slack, Notion or Confluence, so a colleague can answer a client without them.
- Work to a staggered rota where half the team takes Friday off and half takes Monday, keeping the business open five days for customers.
- Protect two or three uninterrupted focus blocks a day, with notifications off, to absorb the lost hours.
- Track output rather than attendance — tickets closed in Jira, pipeline in a CRM, cases resolved in Zendesk — against a baseline agreed before the change.
- Report trial data to whoever owns the pilot: sick days, customer response times, revenue, and staff wellbeing surveys.
- Manage clients and suppliers who still work five days, with clear auto-responders and response-time commitments.
Where this work happens. Iceland's trials between 2015 and 2019 moved roughly 2,500 public-sector workers to a 35- or 36-hour week with no cut in pay (Quartz, 2022). The UK pilot of June to December 2022, coordinated by 4 Day Week Global with the Autonomy Institute and Cambridge and Boston College researchers, involved 61 companies and around 2,900 employees on full pay (4dayweek.io). A separate global pilot ending in 2022, mostly US and Irish firms, covered 33 companies and 903 workers (CNN Business, 2022). Microsoft Japan closed offices on Fridays for a month in August 2019 (CNBC, 2019). Sectors cluster: software, agencies, finance and professional services, charities, and some manufacturing and local government.
A typical schedule. Three common shapes. Four eight-hour days at full pay, around 32 hours — the model in Spain's government-approved pilot, which used 50 million euros of EU funding to compensate an estimated 200 companies (TIME, 2021). A modest reduction to 35 or 36 hours, as in Iceland. Or a compressed week: the same full-time hours over four longer days, which is what Belgian full-time workers gained the right to request from the end of November 2022 under the Labour Deal (American Bar Association, 2023).
How to become one (steps)
- Check your country's legal position first. Read your labour ministry's own page on working time before you assume anything. Belgium's Labour Deal gives full-time workers the right to request four longer days on the same salary and benefits, but the scheme is voluntary and employers can refuse provided they give solid reasons for every refusal (American Bar Association, 2023). Most countries have no such route at all. Time: one to two hours. Cost: free.
- Search for employers that already run it. Filter job boards for "four-day week" and "32-hour week", check the employer listings maintained by the 4 Day Week Foundation, and set a LinkedIn alert. Ask a recruiter in your sector which of their clients kept it after a pilot. Time: two to six weeks of steady searching. Cost: free.
- Ask the question in the interview, and get the detail. One line — "Is that 32 hours on full pay, or full hours compressed into four days?" — separates a genuine policy from a marketing line. Ask whether it survived the trial and whether it is in the contract. Time: one conversation per employer.
- Build a written business case if you want to change your current job. Two pages: the problem, the model, the trial length, the metrics, the review date. Use published pilot evidence — 56 of the 61 UK pilot companies, 92%, continued after the trial, with 18 making it permanent (World Economic Forum, 2023), and sick days fell 65% while revenue stayed broadly the same. Time: one to two weeks. Cost: free.
- Take it to your line manager before HR. A manager who has agreed the cover plan is worth more than a polished deck. Bring the rota, not just the argument. Time: one meeting, then two to four weeks for a decision.
- Agree a baseline and metrics before day one. Put them in a shared Google Sheet or Looker Studio dashboard: output, customer response time, sick days, revenue, plus a short staff survey. Without a baseline you cannot defend the result. Time: one to two weeks.
- Run a time-boxed pilot of three to six months. The UK pilot ran six months; Microsoft Japan's Work Life Choice Challenge ran a single month and still reported sales per employee up 39.9% on the same month a year earlier (CNBC, 2019). Costs vary with whether you hire cover, buy external facilitation, or run it in-house — get written quotes before you commit. Time: three to six months.
- Get the outcome written into your contract. A pilot that drifts on informally is the one that quietly disappears when your manager changes. Ask HR for a written variation to your terms. Time: one to four weeks.
The spread in all these timelines comes down to three things: whether your employer has run any workplace trial before, whether your role has measurable output, and whether customers expect five-day cover.
Skills you'll need (list)
Hard skills
- Async written communication. Handover notes, decision records and status updates in Notion, Confluence or Slack that remove the need for a meeting or a phone call on your day off.
- Work tracking and WIP limits. Jira, Asana, Trello or Linear, used properly — visible queues, limits on work in progress, and a definition of done. Compressed weeks fail when nobody can see the backlog.
- Calendar engineering. Blocking focus time, setting meeting defaults to 25 and 50 minutes, and running shared availability through Google Calendar or Calendly so a four-day team still looks reachable.
- Reporting and basic analysis. Pivot tables in Excel or Google Sheets, or a simple Looker Studio dashboard, to show before-and-after numbers rather than opinions.
- Automation. Zapier, Power Automate or native workflow tools to remove the repetitive admin that eats the recovered day.
- Rota and coverage design. Scheduling tools such as Deputy or When I Work, plus a shared inbox in Front or Zendesk, so customers never hit a closed door.
Soft skills
- Ruthless prioritisation. Show it with a list of the meetings, reports and approvals you removed last quarter and what happened afterwards.
- Negotiation. Show it with the two-page pilot proposal you wrote and the concessions you offered — a review date, a right to revert, coverage on your day off.
- Reliability under compression. Show it with a clean record on deadlines during a busy period, not with a claim about working hard.
- Stakeholder management. Show it by naming the clients you kept informed through a schedule change and how you set their expectations.
- Self-management. Show it with a handover document a stranger could pick up. That single artefact convinces most managers more than the evidence base does.
Pay and outlook (prose)
Pay under a four-day week depends almost entirely on which model you are offered. In the headline trials, hours fell and pay did not: Iceland's public-sector trials cut hours with no reduction in pay (Quartz, 2022), the UK pilot ran on 100% pay (4dayweek.io), and the global pilot of 33 companies and 903 workers did the same (CNN Business, 2022). Compressed weeks like Belgium's keep both the hours and the salary — you work the same total, in four longer days (American Bar Association, 2023). What you should watch for is the third model: a genuine cut to part-time hours with pro-rata pay, sometimes presented in the same language. Ask which one is on the table, in writing.
Beyond the model, pay is driven by the usual things — your occupation, sector, location, seniority and whether output is easy to measure. A four-day week is not a pay band. For current rates in your occupation, use the official source for your country: in the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook and the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables; in the UK, the Office for National Statistics earnings data; elsewhere, your national statistics office or labour ministry. For legal entitlements, read the labour ministry's own page rather than a news summary.
On outlook, the direction has been towards more employers keeping it rather than fewer. One year after the UK pilot, at least 54 of the 61 companies, 89%, still had the policy in place and 31 firms, 51%, had made it permanent (CNBC, 2024). A late-2025 follow-up of 17 British businesses run by the 4 Day Week Foundation reported every employer choosing to keep it, with 62% of staff reporting reduced burnout (4dayweek.io). In Iceland, 86% of the workforce now has the option of reduced hours for the same pay, and by 2022 51% had taken it up (Gulf News); researchers at the Autonomy Institute and Alda noted Icelandic GDP grew 4.1% in 2023, above the European and OECD average (IT Pro, 2024).
The honest downside. Pilots are self-selecting — firms that volunteer are firms that think it will work, and there is no guarantee your sector behaves the same way. Compressed ten-hour days can be worse than five normal ones if you have caring responsibilities or a commute. Hospitals, retail, logistics and hospitality cannot simply delete a day, so coverage costs rise. Work intensification is real: the recovered day is often paid for by cutting meetings you liked. And where a right to request exists, it is a right to ask, not to receive — Belgian employers can refuse with solid reasons (American Bar Association, 2023). Anywhere else, your four-day week lasts exactly as long as your employer wants it to unless it is in your contract.
Career path (timeline)
There is no single job title here. Two paths run in parallel: working in a role at a four-day-week employer, and becoming the person who designs and defends the policy.
| Stage | Typical titles | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Any individual contributor role at an employer running a four-day or compressed week; pilot participant; people or operations coordinator | 0–2 |
| Mid | Team lead or manager responsible for rota and coverage; pilot coordinator; people operations manager; workplace project manager | 2–5 |
| Senior | Head of people, operations director, or COO owning the policy; workplace policy researcher or consultant with organisations such as the Autonomy Institute or the 4 Day Week Foundation | 5–10+ |
In the first two years your job is to prove the model works in your own patch: hit your commitments inside the shorter week and leave behind documentation good enough that your absence on a Friday costs nobody anything.
Between years two and five the work shifts to other people — designing rotas, holding the line on meeting culture, and producing the numbers that keep the policy alive at budget time. This is the stage where most policies die, usually because nobody owned the reporting.
From around year five, the senior version of this work is organisation-wide: contracts, coverage economics, client expectations and the decision paper that makes a trial permanent. Of the 61 UK pilot companies, 18 made the change permanent immediately after the trial (World Economic Forum, 2023) and 31 had done so a year later (CNBC, 2024) — the difference is largely a year of someone doing this job well. Consulting and research are the common exits, alongside senior people and operations roles at employers that want the same result.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a degree to get a four-day-week job?
No. A four-day week is a working-time arrangement, not an occupation, so the entry requirements are whatever your actual job requires. That said, the roles most likely to offer one — software, marketing, design, finance, consulting, charity and public-sector professional roles — often ask for a degree or an equivalent portfolio. Shift-based and customer-facing sectors are harder to compress, and qualifications will not change that. If you want the policy-side career, people operations and HR routes matter more than any specific degree.
Can I work a four-day week remotely?
Often, yes — many employers that adopted a shorter week also run remote or hybrid setups, and both depend on the same habit of writing things down instead of holding meetings. But the two are separate policies. Some four-day-week employers require office days; some fully remote employers work five days. Ask about each one specifically in the interview, and check whether remote work is contractual or discretionary. Note too that working remotely from another country raises tax and employment questions you should put to a qualified adviser.
How long does it take to get onto a four-day week?
If you are job hunting, a few weeks to a few months, depending on how many employers in your field and location run one. If you are asking your current employer, plan for one to two weeks to write the business case, two to four weeks for a decision, then a three to six month pilot before anything becomes permanent. The UK pilot ran six months from June to December 2022 (4dayweek.io); Microsoft Japan's trial ran a single month (CNBC, 2019).
Which countries have gone furthest on this?
Iceland, after public-sector trials from 2015 to 2019 that cut hours with no loss of pay, now has 86% of its workforce with the option of reduced hours for the same pay, and 51% had taken it up by 2022 (Gulf News). Belgium introduced a right for full-time workers to request four longer days from the end of November 2022, though employers may refuse with solid reasons (American Bar Association, 2023). Spain approved a pilot using 50 million euros in EU funding to compensate an estimated 200 companies moving to 32 hours (TIME, 2021). Elsewhere, adoption is company by company.
Does a four-day week mean less pay?
Not in the major trials. The UK pilot and the global pilot of 33 companies both ran on 100% pay (4dayweek.io; CNN Business, 2022), and Belgium's compressed model keeps the same salary and benefits because the hours are unchanged. But some employers offer what is really pro-rata part-time work under the same label. Get the hours and the pay written down before you accept, and check how the arrangement affects pension contributions, holiday entitlement and any hourly-rate calculations.
Sources
- Quartz — Iceland's four-day work week trial was a triumph for all (2022-11-08)
- Gulf News — SPECIAL REPORT: Why the world is embracing 4-day weeks
- IT Pro — Iceland's four-day working week trials have been a roaring success (2024-10-25)
- 4dayweek.io — 4 Day Week in United Kingdom: Trials & Culture
- World Economic Forum — The world's biggest trial of the four-day work week has come to an end. These are the results (2023-03-10)
- CNBC — Most UK firms stick with a four-day working week after taking part in world's biggest trial (2024-02-22)
- American Bar Association — Belgium: Belgium approves the four-day work week (2023-02-09)
- CNBC — Microsoft Japan's 4-day workweek experiment sees productivity jump 40% (2019-11-04)
- TIME — Will Spain's Four-Day Work Week Work? (2021-03-22)
- CNN Business — Global 4-day week pilot was a huge success, organizers say (2022-11-30)
