What if I worked four days a week?

Days and hours are not the same lever

Dropping a day while keeping 7.5 hours on the remaining days is a cut in annual hours. Dropping a day while raising hours per day toward ten is closer to a compressed pattern: similar hours, a different shape. ONS figures on actual hours worked are a national backdrop, not your rota. Move both sliders if you want to see the distinction clearly.

Free weekdays, not “time off in the legal sense”

The extra free weekdays are simply current days minus new days, multiplied by working weeks. They are calendar squares, not additional statutory leave. Weekends are unchanged unless you currently work them. The experiment does not convert those weekdays into money, leisure quality or childcare cover.

Holiday weeks change the denominator

GOV.UK describes statutory paid holiday as 5.6 weeks for most workers, with a 28-day cap that matters if someone works six days. Employers may include bank holidays inside that figure. Using 5.6 as a default keeps the working year realistic; raising it toward eight weeks (a more generous package) shrinks both patterns in parallel, so the gap in days is a little smaller.

Worked example: two ways to drop a day

Start from a five-day, 37.5-hour week with 5.6 weeks of paid holiday (46.4 working weeks a year).

1. Reduced hours: keep 7.5-hour days and work four of them. That is 30 hours a week and 46 fewer working days a year, about 348 fewer hours.
2. Compressed hours: keep 37.5 hours but fit them into four days. Each day becomes 9 hours 22 minutes, with the same 46 extra free weekdays but no drop in hours.
3. Holiday on four days a week is pro rata: 5.6 × 4 = 22.4 days, which still equals 5.6 weeks off.

Either way you gain about 46 free weekdays a year. The difference is whether your total hours, and usually your pay, fall by a fifth or stay the same.

What people get wrong

“A four-day week always means a 20% pay cut.”

It depends on the arrangement. In the UK pilot run from June to December 2022, staff kept full pay for 80% of the time, with the aim of keeping output the same. Compressed hours keep pay and hours the same. A reduced-hours contract usually lowers pay.

“You have a legal right to a four-day week.”

You have a legal right to ask. Employees can request flexible working from their first day in a job, and employers must deal with it reasonably, but they can refuse for set business reasons.

“The trial was a one-off that everyone dropped.”

Of the 61 companies in the 2022 UK pilot, 56 (92%) carried on with a four-day week straight afterwards, and 18 made it permanent.

Common questions

How we calculated this

Working weeks = 52 − holiday weeks (floored at zero). Current days per year = current days × working weeks; likewise for the new pattern. Hours follow days × hours per day. Extra free weekdays = (current days − new days) × working weeks. Hours per day are held constant unless you change them — this is not an automatic compressed-hours conversion. The calculation is a count of weekdays and hours only.

Assumptions and limitations

Sources

• GOV.UK — holiday entitlement

  Statutory paid leave is described as 5.6 weeks for most workers, with a 28-day cap and notes on bank holidays.

• Office for National Statistics — earnings and working hours

  Official series on hours actually worked, used here only as context for a typical full-time day length.

• Office for National Statistics — Time use in the UK

  How paid work sits alongside unpaid work and leisure in an average day — a reminder that “free” time has a shape.

• Autonomy — The results are in: the UK’s four-day week pilot

  61 companies and about 2,900 workers, June to December 2022; 56 continued and 18 made it permanent.

• GOV.UK — Flexible working

  Employees can request flexible working from their first day in a job.

All IfSketch sources · Methodology