According to an annual update published by Eurofound, the actual working week of full-time employees was longer than the average normal collectively agreed working week in almost all EU Member States in 2010. In the EU, the actual working week was 39.7 hours in 2010, 1.7 hours longer than the agreed working week.

European workers spend more time at work than in 2010. This is the main conclusion of an Eurofound's latest annual update of working time developments. According to this report, the data reverses the trend, visible since 2006, of a narrowing gap between actual and collectively agreed working hours. Collective agreements set the working time conditions for an average of three quarters of all workers across the European Union, with large differences between countries.

The average agreed working week across the EU was 38 hours long in 2010, an increase of 0.1 hours in relation to the 37.9 recorded in 2009, and 38.6 hours in 2008 and 2007. In the 12 new Member States, the working week remained at 39.7 hours, which means that the gap between older and newer Member States was slightly reduced from 2.2 to 2.1 hours in 2010. Moreover, the actual working week was 39.7 hours in 2010 in the whole EU, 1.7 hours longer than the agreed working week. In addition, in 2010 the European Commission already proposed a revision of the working time rules in the EU.

The longest actual working weeks, for full-time employees in their main jobs in 2010, were in Romania (41.3 hours), followed by Luxembourg, the UK, Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia and the Czech Republic. The shortest actual working week was in Finland (37.8 hours). And in 2010, the actual weekly hours of male employees working full time in their main jobs continued to exceed those of their female counterparts in all countries considered. With regard to the sector, the manufacturing sector together with the local government sector recorded the longest average agreed normal weekly working hours with 37.8 hours, followed by the banking sector with 37.4 hours.

On the amount of paid annual leave to which workers are entitled, the average collectively agreed entitlement is 25.4 days in the EU. Agreed annual leave entitlement in the EU15 varies from 30 days in Denmark and Germany to 25 days in Finland, France, the Netherlands (and Norway) to 24.6 days in the UK and 24 in Ireland. On the other hand, the number of public holidays (excluding those falling on Sundays) varied across the EU in 2010, from 14 in Spain to five in the Netherlands. The average figure for the EU27 was 9.6 public holidays. The combined total of agreed annual leave and public holidays varied in the EU from 40 days in Germany and Denmark to 27 days in Romania.