---
title: "The four-day week (research idea)"
description: "Working hours appear on 41 recent papers in the economics journals and working time reduction on 4, but the four-day week, now being trialled by hundreds of firms and by some governments, appears under no keyword of its own. Do firms that cut hours without cutting pay keep output, and who gains the hours?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/the-four-day-week
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/the-four-day-week.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Working hours appear on 41 recent papers in the economics journals and working time reduction on 4, but the four-day week, now being trialled by hundreds of firms and by some governments, appears under no keyword of its own."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["economics", "labor", "management"]
keywords: ["working hours", "working time reduction"]
---

# The four-day week

Working hours appear on 41 recent papers in the economics journals and working time reduction on 4, but the four-day week, now being trialled by hundreds of firms and by some governments, appears under no keyword of its own. Do firms that cut hours without cutting pay keep output, and who gains the hours?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 52 papers carry a working-hours, working-time or work-week keyword (45 in economics journals): "working hours" on 41, "working time reduction" on 4, "flexible working hours" on 3. No keyword in the archive names the four-day week, although trials in the UK, Iceland, Germany, Japan and Portugal have reported results.

## Questions

- In firm trials, did output per week hold up because of fewer meetings and less idle time, or because workers compressed the same hours?
- Did turnover, sick leave and hiring costs fall by enough to pay for the fifth day?
- Which jobs cannot compress, and would a general shift widen the gap between office and shift workers?

## Data that could help

Trial data from the pilot organizers, firm productivity and turnover records, and time-use surveys of participants.

## Next step

Collect the published results of the national and firm-level trials since 2021 and compare productivity and retention outcomes by sector.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| working hours | 3 | #776 | 2, 5, 1, 6, 3, 5, 6, 4, 6, 2, 5, 4, 5, 2, 3, 1, 3, 4, 2, 3, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 7, 3, 4, 5, 3, 2, 5, 2 | 125 |
| working time reduction | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 | 12 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). The four-day week. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/the-four-day-week

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-the-four-day-week,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {The four-day week},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/the-four-day-week}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).