The five-day, forty-hour workweek has ruled office life for nearly a century, but cracks are showing. Governments from Northern Europe to the Gulf have started writing shorter workweeks into law or public policy, and the early data is hard to ignore. Instead of collapsing under fewer hours, many of these economies have held steady or even improved on output, absenteeism, and worker wellbeing.
What follows are five countries where national or state-level policy, not just isolated company experiments, has pushed the four-day or compressed workweek into the mainstream. Each one took a different legal route, from outright government mandates to negotiated rights, and each has generated real productivity data worth examining.
1. Belgium: The Legal Right to Compress the Week
Belgium made global headlines when its federal government passed labor reforms giving workers a formal path to a shorter week. As of the end of November 2022, full-time workers in Belgium, both white-collar and blue-collar, gained the right to request a four-day work week.[1] The catch is that this isn’t a shorter total workload. Belgium’s program condenses the current five-day week into four days, meaning employees maintain a 38-hour working week with an additional day off compensating for longer work days.[2]
The employer can’t simply say no without justification. Belgian labor minister Pierre-Yves Dermagne said the decision resides with the worker, stating “this has to be done at the request of the employee, with the employer giving solid reasons for any refusal.”[2] Employees also get to test the arrangement before fully committing, since they are able to request a four-day workweek for a trial six-month period and can then decide to stay with the shortened schedule or opt out.[2] While Belgium hasn’t run a national productivity audit specifically on this policy, it built on the momentum from Iceland’s well-documented results, and it remains one of the clearest legal frameworks in Europe for compressing hours without losing pay.
2. United Arab Emirates: A Federal Government Mandate
The UAE took a more direct approach by simply mandating the shift for its public sector. In December 2021, the country announced it would change its existing five-day workweek to a four-and-a-half day schedule starting January 1, becoming the world’s first country to make that employee-friendly transition as part of its efforts to improve productivity and work-life balance.[3] Under the new federal schedule, Monday through Thursday work hours would run from 7:30am to 3:30pm, followed by a half day on Friday from 7:30am to noon.[3]
The government didn’t just guess this would work, it measured it. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, officials reported that around 70 percent of employees reported working more efficiently, while there was a 55 percent reduction in absenteeism, according to the UAE’s minister for government development and the future.[4] The emirate of Sharjah went even further, adopting a full four-day week for government and many private-sector employees, and since the implementation of the shorter workweek in the UAE, productivity has remained unharmed while employees express greater contentment in their jobs.[5]
3. Iceland: The Trial That Rewrote the Rules
Iceland didn’t mandate a four-day week overnight, but its government-run trials effectively forced the issue nationwide through negotiated labor agreements. Productivity and service provision remained the same or improved across the majority of trial workplaces, while worker wellbeing increased across a range of indicators, from perceived stress and burnout to health and work-life balance.[6] The trials were substantial in scope, involving around 2,500 people, or 1% of Iceland’s working population, run by city authorities or the government along with one of the major trade union confederations, BSRB.[7]
The results didn’t stay confined to a pilot program. In total, roughly 86 percent of Iceland’s entire working population has now either moved to working shorter hours or gained the right to shorten their working hours, with these reductions won in contracts negotiated between 2019 and 2021.[6] The economic aftermath has been reassuring rather than alarming for skeptics. The latest reporting noted that productivity in Iceland has increased the most of the Nordic countries in the last five years, which is noteworthy since critics of the reduced hours initiative repeatedly claimed productivity would not increase in relation to reduced hours.[8]
4. Lithuania: A Targeted Mandate for Working Parents
Lithuania took a narrower but legally binding approach, focused on public-sector parents rather than the entire workforce. Lawmakers in Vilnius backed legislation allowing public-sector employees with children under the age of three to work 32 hours per week.[9] Crucially, this wasn’t a pay cut disguised as a benefit. Under the policy, public-sector employees with children under the age of three are allowed to work 32 hours a week without any reduction in their pay.[10]
The law was designed with more than convenience in mind. The legislation was proposed by the speaker of Lithuania’s parliament, who said the four-day workweek would help the public sector compete for talent against higher-paying private companies, and was also intended to address a persistent gender pay gap, since female employees in Lithuania earned 13 percent less per hour on average than men in 2020.[10] It’s a limited mandate by design, since it only covers a slice of the workforce, but it remains one of the few instances anywhere of a government legally guaranteeing full pay for reduced hours to a specific group of workers.
5. Spain: A National Pilot With Government Funding
Spain took a middle path between full legislation and private experimentation by having its national government directly fund and coordinate a large-scale trial. According to reporting on the initiative, the plan involved private-sector businesses across the country participating in a government-funded pilot program in partnership with 4 Day Week Global, with employees keeping their existing salary while working fewer hours.[11] Unlike a company deciding on its own to try shorter hours, this was a state-backed policy experiment aimed at generating hard data before any broader legislative push.
Spain’s approach reflects a broader trend across Southern Europe, where governments are more cautious about mandating change outright but are still willing to put public money behind testing it. The logic mirrors what Iceland and the UAE already demonstrated: rather than assuming a shorter week will hurt output, put it to the test with real companies and real workers, then let the results guide policy. Spain’s participation in this international pilot network signals that Madrid sees the four-day week as a serious policy question rather than a passing trend.
Taken together, these five cases show that the four-day workweek movement isn’t just a slogan from labor activists or a perk offered by trendy startups. It’s becoming a matter of national policy, backed by government trials, legislation, and in some cases outright mandates for specific sectors of the workforce. The common thread across Belgium, the UAE, Iceland, Lithuania, and Spain is that shorter hours haven’t come at the cost of output. If anything, the evidence suggests rested employees tend to work smarter, not just less.
None of this means a universal four-day week is inevitable everywhere, and the details matter enormously, whether hours are compressed into fewer days or genuinely reduced, whether pay stays the same, and whether the policy applies to everyone or just parts of the workforce. Still, the direction of travel is clear enough that more governments are likely to watch these five countries closely before deciding whether to follow suit.
