--- title: Four-Day Work Weeks Are Good for Employees' Health description: A large pilot study in the U.K. found that four-day work weeks are good for employees health, well-being, and job performance. canonical: https://time.com/6256741/four-day-work-week-benefits/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-02-21T00:01:13.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:25.124Z article:section: Health og:title: Four-Day Work Weeks Are Good for Your Health og:description: According to a large pilot study in the U.K. og:url: https://time.com/6256741/four-day-work-week-benefits/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt350a643d36153f30/6987788b0b72e37e806dcfcc/computer-mouse-3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: TIME.com stock photos Computer Mouse og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Four-Day Work Weeks Are Good for Your Health twitter:description: According to a large pilot study in the U.K. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt350a643d36153f30/6987788b0b72e37e806dcfcc/computer-mouse-3.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- # Four-Day Work Weeks Are Good for Your Health, a Large Study Finds > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=001315f1-53f2-4b2c-9b1d-cc147ffaf385&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Ambition Is Out [Watch (HLS stream): Ambition Is Out](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oRzVU4XX.m3u8) (4:13)  _Published 2022-10-27. First came the “Great Resignation,” followed recently by the phenomenon of “quiet quitting.” Many surveys have also pointed to a sense of malaise and fatigue sweeping the American workforce, apparently culminating in a common desire to do less._ Feb 21, 2023 12:01 AM UTC  Elizabeth Renstrom for TIME  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Feb 21, 2023 12:01 AM UTC [A four-day work week](https://time.com/5948677/four-day-work-week-spain/) improves employees’ health in numerous ways, from reducing anxiety and stress to enabling better sleep and more time for exercise, according to [a large new report](https://www.4dayweek.com/uk-pilot-results). “It genuinely has, even with our academic skepticism, been a really positive outcome,” says report co-author Brendan Burchell, a social sciences professor at the U.K.’s University of Cambridge who studies work’s effects on psychological well-being. The report [builds upon previous studies](https://time.com/charter/6241211/four-day-workweek/) on the lifestyle and health benefits of working less by summarizing the experiences of 61 companies—and a total of about 2,900 employees—that piloted shorter work weeks from June to December 2022\. Companies were recruited to join the study by advocacy groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day Week Campaign and workplace research group Autonomy, and researchers from Boston College and the University of Cambridge, including Burchell, oversaw participant interviews, data collection, and analysis. Companies in the study, most of which were based in the U.K., were free to set their schedules however they wanted, as long as they “meaningfully” reduced working hours without docking pay. More than half of the companies that completed the researchers’ surveys gave all employees either Monday or Friday off, while others tried solutions like staggered schedules or shorter days throughout the week. Over the course of the six-month pilot period, employees’ average weekly working hours fell from 38 to 34—a bit shy of the target 32, which suggests some people either worked more on the days they were in the office or worked some on days off. Still, 71% of respondents said they were working less after the trial ended than before. For many workers, a four-day week translated to better health. About 40% of respondents said they experienced less work-related stress, and 71% reported [lower levels of burnout](https://time.com/6106656/workplace-burnout-pandemic/). More than 40% of employees said their mental health had improved, with significant portions of the group reporting decreases in anxiety and negative emotions. --- ### More from TIME --- **Read More**: [_How to Be Ambitious Without Sacrificing Your Mental Health_](https://time.com/6224158/ambition-mental-health/) Almost 40% of employees also said their physical health got better during the pilot period, perhaps because they had more time for hobbies, exercise, cooking, family time, and other leisure activities. Nearly half of workers also said they weren’t as tired as they were before the experiment, and 40% said it was easier to get to sleep. Burchell feared that shorter weeks would force people to work at a higher pace or intensity when they were on the clock, which could have been stressful enough to negate the wellness benefits of having extra time off. But, he says, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. “People found all sorts of ways of working more efficiently, cutting out lots of the time they were wasting,” he says. In the end, 96% of employees said they preferred four-day schedules. The shift was positive for employers, too. Among companies in the study, revenue increased by an average of about 1% during the pilot period, and employee turnover and absenteeism went down. Almost all of the businesses in the program said they planned to continue the four-day work week experiment, in some cases indefinitely. That’s a good thing, because most employees said they’d need a significant pay bump to go back to working five full days per week, and 15% said no amount of money would convince them to go back. Researcher Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who studies working hours, says she’s optimistic that other companies, including those in the U.S., are waking up to the benefits of shorter work weeks. The growing trend of “summer Fridays” and periodic days off throughout the year, she says, points to a growing acceptance of working less—one that may culminate in four-day work weeks adopted at a wider scale. The pandemic also made people [reimagine what the workplace can look like](https://time.com/collection/future-of-work/), Burchell adds. “When I told people I was looking at work time reductions three years ago, people thought I was a bit utopian, a bit of a dreamer,” he says. “Now, everyone’s talking about it like, ‘This is happening.’” ## Transcript Despite the price hikes millions of Americans have decided to quit their job this year, and it is now being called the Great resignation first team. The great resignation followed recently by the phenomenon of quite quitting. Many surveys have also pointed to a sense of fatigue, sleep in the American Workforce, apparently, culminating in a common desire to do last Hyatt. Quitting is a term, sometimes used to describe people who have decided to not leave their jobs but take a step back from their jobs. So this could look like you know, doing the bare minimum of your job requirements or leaving everyday at 5 on the dot. If your work day is supposed to end at 5, it's just sort of a way for people to reclaim some work-life balance without actually quitting their job. So there's been a lot of data in the later years of the pandemic to suggest that people are not feeling engaged with their work. So a lot of people are reporting that they're actively disengaged from their jobs, mentally checking out. A lot of people are actively looking for new jobs at prioritize work-life balance and hopefully lower stress. And a lot of people are just saying that they're not happy at their current work environment or sort of having this Reckoning with the role that work should play in our lives, in general. And for a lot of people that is turning into a reframing of the way, they think about ambition and accomplishment and striving in their work in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real actual work. Many people have described their newly lacks attitudes toward work as a loss of ambition. But it's hard to say whether ambition is actually dropping across the u.s. population. So a study from the society for human resources management and which is a group that does a lot of workplace research found that about half of respondents were actively looking for a new job as of July of this year and a lot of people who had recently, left job said that they had done that because they wanted better work-life balance. Considering large cultural factors changes, are happening in some Industries, but the progress has been slow, leading some people who can afford to step back to replace corporate ladder climbing in favor of more, satisfying, social family or personal lives, think about ambition and burnout on an individual level because anybody who has a job is working within a larger economy and a larger system, so things like inflation and wages, not keeping Pace with that. Things like workplace is not prioritizing worker, safety during the pandemic. Things like income inequality, all of that contributes to the way that we think about our work and we think about our ambition. So to a large extent, ambition is defined by the place. You work in the country working. Just as much as it is by yourself workers. Questioning the purpose of their jobs, in a row work, should claim their lives is nothing new. However, According to some experts and maybe it's that many people are thinking, critically about work, and in some cases to think of Alex A lot of psychological research suggests that if you can focus on goals that are important to you and that you find internally motivating that your work can actually serve your mental health instead of hurting. So, maybe that would be focusing on how good it will feel to finish a task or learn a new skill as opposed to just driving for the next promotion or the next Rays. So it's the extent that you can focus on things that you personally find meaningful and not external markers of success. 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