The 35-Hour Week That Isn't, and the 35-Hour Week That Actually Is: France and Norway on Overtime
Priya MehtaOctober 27, 2026 5 min read
🇫🇷 France · 🇳🇴 Norway
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
France is internationally famous for its legally mandated 35-hour work week — and only 28.4 percent of French workers actually work one, according to BFMTV reporting on official labor figures, with the real national average closer to 40 hours once overtime, weekend work, and after-8pm hours are counted in. Norway, which makes far less noise internationally about its working hours, simply has a 35-hour average week in practice, no legislative fanfare required, and backs it with a 94 percent job-satisfaction rate that is the envy of the rest of Europe. One country legislated the dream and missed it; the other seems to have quietly lived it.
Do's & Don'ts
🇫🇷 France
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Expect RTT days (réduction du temps de travail) as real compensatory time off if you work beyond 35 hours — public-sector workers get around 34 extra days a year, private-sector around 27 | Assume the 35-hour week is actually worked by most people — only about 28% of French employees follow it in practice |
| Know your right to disconnect (droit à la déconnexion) — it's a real, legally protected concept, not just a slogan | Expect it to mean no after-hours contact ever; roughly a third of French workers report regularly working weekends, holidays, or after 8pm |
| Use your RTT days — public-sector employees take an average of 46 a year, more than their formal allotment in some structures, private-sector around 29 | Expect universal agreement that the system works — French politicians across administrations have repeatedly proposed scrapping or loosening the rule, most recently amid 2024 budget pressure |
| Expect long, protected lunch breaks as a cultural norm alongside the shorter nominal week | Assume shorter legislated hours automatically mean lower overall workload — critics argue pay and output expectations haven't shifted to match |
| Treat the 35-hour week as a genuine point of political and personal identity for many French workers, not just a technical rule | Bring up abolishing it casually in conversation — it remains a loaded, actively contested topic two decades after its introduction |
🇳🇴 Norway
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Expect a genuinely shorter average week in practice — about 35 hours, achieved without the French-style legislative battle | Assume flexible hours mean lower productivity — Norwegian colleagues and researchers alike express skepticism that longer, rigid hours elsewhere actually produce more |
| Use flexible scheduling norms if offered — leaving early for a specific personal reason and making it up later is culturally accepted | Assume flexibility means no long days ever — 34% of Norwegians report 10+ hour days at least 10 days a month, notably higher than the EU average |
| Take your full holiday entitlement — Norwegian workplace advice to newcomers explicitly encourages this as a cultural value, not an indulgence | Overlook the trade-offs — Norway also reports higher sickness-related absence and more reported workplace humiliation than EU averages, alongside its high satisfaction scores |
| Expect real self-determination in how your workday is structured — about nine in ten Norwegian workers report this, a rising figure | Assume flexibility applies evenly to everyone — women in Norway report more workplace threats and harassment than the EU average, a less-discussed caveat |
| Compare Norwegian norms directly with other countries if you're unsure what's expected — colleagues are often happy to explain the contrast explicitly | Expect a fixed office-hours culture resembling France's traditional 08:00–18:00 structure — the norm here is considerably looser |
France
The 35-hour week remains, almost three decades after Lionel Jospin's government made it mandatory in 2000, one of the most symbolically loaded pieces of labor policy anywhere in Europe — and also, per the numbers, one of the least literally observed. Institut Montaigne put the actual 2022 average French work week at 39.8 hours, while INSEE's full-time figure came in even higher at 40.1; BFMTV's reporting found only 28.4 percent of workers genuinely clocked 35 hours, with roughly a third regularly working weekends, public holidays, or past 8pm. Hofstede's numbers help explain why the rule persists as policy even as practice drifts from it: France scores 86 on uncertainty avoidance, among the highest in Europe, a profile that favors strong, codified rules precisely because they provide structural certainty — whether or not everyone follows them to the letter.
The RTT (réduction du temps de travail) compensatory-leave system built around the policy is where the real negotiation happens day to day: public-sector employees nominally owed around 34 extra days a year for working past 35 hours, and private-sector workers around 27, with Labour Ministry figures from 2017 showing actual average usage running even higher in the public sector (46 days) than private (29). A reader comment on The Local France, posted under the name LFP, captured the policy's core tension bluntly: the 35-hour week pairs shorter hours with largely unchanged workloads and pay, amounting, in the commenter's phrasing, to "Work less, earn less" — a framing that echoes recurring political pushes, including a fresh 2024 attempt amid budget pressure, to loosen or abolish the rule entirely. Supporters, including figures like former labor minister Martine Aubry, have long argued the opposite: that shorter mandated hours force companies to hire more staff rather than squeeze existing ones harder.
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Norway
Norway's version of work-life balance arrived with none of France's legislative drama and, by several measures, works rather better. A STAMI (National Institute of Occupational Health) survey reported by ScienceNorway found roughly nine in ten Norwegian employees satisfied with how work and private life fit together — the best result among the European countries studied — alongside a 94 percent overall job-satisfaction rate against an 86 percent EU average. Researcher Cecilie Aagestad attributed this to Norway simply organizing the combination of job and private life "better" than most EU peers, backed by an average working week of around 35 hours achieved through flexible scheduling rather than a hard legal ceiling, with just 8% of Norwegian workers logging 45+ hours versus 15% across the EU.
That flexibility has real texture in practice, not just statistics. Benjamin Cretois, a researcher in Trondheim quoted in Tekna's guidance for newcomers, described simply leaving work early to walk his dog and letting colleagues assume he'd "catch up later" — and, comparing this directly with France's more rigid 08:00–18:00 office culture, said plainly: "I doubt that they are more productive there than here." Fellow contributor Xiaopeng Li offered newcomers blunter advice still: "Take all the holidays and enjoy nature! Life is more than work." The caveats are real, though, and worth taking seriously rather than treating Norway as a flawless model: the same research found 34% of Norwegians logging 10-plus-hour days at least ten times a month (nearly double the EU share), alongside Europe's highest rate of sickness-related leave and above-average reports of workplace humiliation and harassment — satisfaction and strain coexisting rather than canceling out.
The Reckoning
The real irony is that France legislated its way toward a number — 35 hours — that Norway simply arrived at through looser cultural norms and genuine flexibility, without ever writing it into comparable law. Hofstede's numbers suggest why: Norway's astonishingly low 8 masculinity score, among the lowest anywhere, reflects a culture oriented toward quality of life and consensus rather than competitive achievement, which plays out as colleagues trusting Cretois to make up his hours after the dog walk, rather than needing RTT days and a labor ministry to formalize the trade. France's higher uncertainty-avoidance score, by contrast, produces exactly the kind of rigid, codified system — 35 hours by law, RTT days by formula — that becomes a political battleground precisely because it's written down and therefore arguable.
The practical lesson for anyone choosing between these postings: France's famous short week is a legal entitlement you will likely have to actively claim and defend, amid genuine political pressure to roll it back, while Norway's shorter week is closer to an ambient cultural default you'll absorb simply by watching what your colleagues do — with the caveat that "flexible" in Norway sometimes means irregular long days rather than uniformly short ones, just with more trust attached to the arrangement. Both systems, in their own way, prove the same point: a shorter working week is less a number on a contract than a culture's answer to how much it trusts its own workers to manage the rest.
The Part the Brochure Left Out
The Local France (named reader comment) — A reader identified as LFP argued that France's 35-hour week pairs reduced hours with unchanged workloads and pay, summarizing the trade-off in three words: "Work less, earn less."
Tekna.no (named first-person account) — Benjamin Cretois, a researcher working in Trondheim, described leaving the office early to walk his dog with colleagues simply assuming he'd make up the time later, and said of France's more rigid office-hours culture by comparison, "I doubt that they are more productive there than here."
Conclusion
If work-life balance is the deciding factor in this move, the honest framing is that France offers you a right you'll need to actively exercise against real political headwinds, while Norway offers you a norm you'll mostly just need to notice and trust. Neither is free of friction — France's RTT system and ongoing abolition debates on one side, Norway's higher sickness-leave and long-day rates on the other — but only one of them required an act of parliament to get this close to 35 hours, and it still isn't quite there.
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Photo by RDNE Stock project via Pexels
Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.