The working week in 55 countries — free dataset

What the data says

• 8 of 55 countries do not rest on Saturday and Sunday. Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia — mostly Sunday to Thursday. A scheduler that assumes a Saturday–Sunday weekend books meetings on their days off.
• The office day opens earliest in Qatar, at 07:00 and latest in Georgia, which is still working at 19:00. That spread is wider than most time-zone gaps within Europe.
• The longest standard week is Colombia's, at 50 hours against Afghanistan's 40. Same five days, 10 hours apart.

How much to trust each column

The weekends are checked. Every one is compared against Unicode CLDR — maintained independently of this dataset, and exposed by every browser through Intl. 53 of 55 agree exactly, and a test in the build fails if that stops being true. The 2 that differ are deliberate rather than errors: CLDR records the calendar's weekend and this dataset records the office week, and for India and Iran those genuinely differ. Each disagreement is argued in writing rather than defaulted.

The hours are not, because they cannot be. There is no machine-readable register of statutory office hours anywhere. These are published national conventions — labour rules and government guidance — reviewed by hand once a year. They describe what a country's offices generally do, not what any employer's contract says, and a country we hold no profile for is not guessed at: it falls back to a nine-to-five and the page says so.

That asymmetry is the honest ceiling of this data, and stating it is the point. A dataset that says which half is verified is worth more to whoever cites it than one that implies both are.

All 55 countries