Where do people work the most on weekends? - Balkan and Mediterranean countries lead
More than one in five workers across Europe, 21.3%, regularly work shifts on Saturdays and Sundays, according to the latest Eurostat data. In some countries, the average is much higher than this, particularly across the Balkans and the Mediterranean.
In Greece, 41% of employees and self-employed people are active during the weekend, 33% in Bosnia and Herzegovina and 32% in Malta, Cyprus and North Macedonia.
At the same time, the North and East of the continent show much lower rates. In Lithuania, only 4% of workers work weekends, 7% in Hungary and 7.5% in Poland.
It is perhaps no great surprise that business owners take fewer weekends off than employees: 46% of them have to be at work compared to 18.5% of employees. When it comes to employees alone, Greece, Cyprus and North Macedonia remain in the top spots with rates above 30%, followed by Switzerland and Malta, slightly lower, at 29%. On the self-employed or employers front, Greece again shows the highest rate at 75%.
Nearly half of all service and sales workers (47.6%) regularly work weekends, as do people in agriculture, forestry and fishing (47.2%).
But the current trend in Europe seems to be more about shortening the workweek than lengthening it. The latest country to try this was Poland, a fast-growing economy that has also struggled with burnout. In the summer of 2025, the country launched a pilot project that aimed to reduce the workweek from 39 hours to 35, without any pay cuts. Employees could choose between three options: work six hours a day, take a three-day weekend, or have extra days off.
The experiment, launched by the Ministry of Labor in 90 public and private workplaces and 5,000 employees, will be evaluated in 2027. Each participating workplace was compensated up to 210,000 euros to help cover any disruption to rotation caused by reduced working hours.
Other European countries that tested the four-day workweek were the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Iceland, France and Spain.
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