Annual Hours Worked per Worker

Canada vs US hours worked: Canadians work about 100 fewer hours a year, and the Bank of Canada doesn't think it's a problem

OECD's "average annual hours actually worked per worker" series puts Canada at roughly 1,690 hours/year and the United States at roughly 1,800 hours/year in 2024 — a gap of about 110 hours, or 6%. That gap has been remarkably stable for two and a half decades. It is also much smaller than the 25–30% gap in GDP per hour worked. The political-economy story underneath is that Canada's economic problem is not that Canadians work too little; it is that each Canadian hour produces less output. The Bank of Canada's senior leadership treats hours per worker as essentially a non-issue. This page is about why that framing is correct, what the 6% gap actually contains, and how vacation, part-time share, and sectoral mix add up.

For the indicator definition (OECD average annual hours actually worked per worker, all employed) see the Hours Worked indicator page. This page is about the Canada–US gap.

The numbers

From the OECD-style series above and the most recent national agency releases:

• Canada, 2000: about 1,789 hours/worker.
• Canada, 2018: about 1,704.
• Canada, 2020 trough: about 1,657 — pandemic low.
• Canada, 2024: about 1,691.
• Canada, 2026 (latest): about 1,694.
• United States, 2000: about 1,880.
• United States, 2018: about 1,826.
• United States, 2020 trough: about 1,789.
• United States, 2024: about 1,801.
• United States, 2026 (latest): about 1,798.

A persistent 100–110 hour gap, both countries trending gently down over 25 years, both countries hitting a pandemic trough in 2020, both countries failing to recover to their 2018 levels. The most striking pattern is the post-2022 plateau: hours per worker in both countries have been essentially flat since the recovery, even as employment has continued to grow.

A common confusion: some media sources cite a US figure around 1,976 hours/year. That is the "full-time-equivalent only" concept and should not be compared to the OECD all-employed series. The right comparison is 1,690 vs 1,801 — a 6% gap, not the 17% gap implied by the FTE-only number.

Vacation and statutory holidays explain about a third of the gap

The single largest mechanical contributor is paid time off. Canada guarantees a minimum of 10 paid vacation days in most provinces (rising to 15 with seniority) plus 9 to 13 statutory holidays depending on province — a realistic median Canadian total of about 19 paid days off in the first year of employment. The United States is the only OECD country with no statutory paid vacation guarantee at all. Roughly 25% of US private-sector employees receive zero paid leave. The BLS Employee Benefits Survey finds the average among workers who do get paid holidays is about 8 days, against 11 federal holidays on the books.

A 5-day gap between a typical Canadian and a typical American, at 7.5 hours per day, works out to roughly 37 to 40 hours/year — about a third of the entire 110-hour gap. The OECD's "How's Life? 2024" finds that 3% of Canadian employees work very long hours (50+ per week) versus 10–11% of Americans, the cleanest single statistic for the work-life-balance side of the comparison.

Part-time share is the second-largest contributor

Canada's part-time employment share — about 18–19% of total employment in 2024 on the StatCan LFS basis — is several percentage points higher than the US (~17% on the BLS CPS basis at the <35-hour threshold, or roughly 13% on the OECD-comparable <30-hour basis). A few percentage points of additional part-time share knocks roughly 20–30 hours off Canada's average. Combined with the vacation effect, that accounts for about half to two-thirds of the total 110-hour gap. The remainder is weekly hours among full-time workers, sectoral composition, and absence rates.

The 2024–2026 plateau is extensive, not intensive

Both countries' hours per worker have been essentially flat since 2022, even as employment has continued to grow. The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 phrases it bluntly: "between 2019 and 2024, in most OECD countries, hours worked per capita continued their downward trend." The mechanism in both countries is the same: the recovery in employment came through more workers, not more hours per existing worker. In Canada, immigration has added a substantial number of newcomers, students, and re-entrants who tilt part-time. In the US, labour-force re-entry post-pandemic similarly leaned toward part-time and hybrid arrangements.

Return-to-office mandates have been the most visible recent labour-market story but they barely show up in measured hours, because survey hours capture work performed, not commute time or office presence. Canada's federal public service moved to 3 days/week on-site in September 2024 (executives 4 days/week); BMO, RBC, and Scotiabank moved to 4 days. Trump's January 2025 executive order requires US federal employees to return to office full-time, and Amazon and AT&T followed. None of this has moved the OECD hours number.

The MacGee–Rodrigue twist: hours per working-age adult are basically the same

The most original recent contribution to this literature is Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper 2024-49, "The Distributional Origins of the Canada–US GDP and Labour Productivity Gaps," by Jim MacGee (Bank of Canada) and Joel Rodrigue (Vanderbilt), released December 2024. Their headline finding is that the top 10% of the income distribution accounts for roughly three-quarters of the Canada–US GDP per adult gap and up to two-thirds of the measured labour productivity gap. But the paper contains a subtler finding that is directly relevant here: average hours worked per working-age adult in Canada and the United States were similar in 1970 and 2019. The hours gap, in other words, is largely an artifact of who is in the labour force and how part-time employment is distributed — not of Canadians being structurally lazier.

The same paper also points to selective brain-drain emigration of high-ability workers from Canada to the US (recent Canadian net emigration hit a 50-year high of 65,372 in 2024–25). The high-earning workers who would have been at the top of Canada's hours distribution are increasingly in the US distribution instead. Like the Gini gap, the hours gap is not entirely an independent observation between two separate populations.

The Bank of Canada's revealing silence on hours

Senior Bank of Canada officials — Carolyn Rogers, Tiff Macklem, Nicolas Vincent — give long speeches about Canada's productivity gap but rarely if ever discuss hours per worker as a problem. Rogers' famous March 2024 Halifax speech, "Time to Break the Glass: Fixing Canada's Productivity Problem," used the phrase "emergency" and noted that Canada produced 88% of US value per hour in 1984 against 71% in 2022 — but did not propose lengthening the Canadian work week. Vincent's November 2025 Québec speech defined productivity as "producing more with what we have… producing better" — explicitly not working longer hours. Macklem's June 2024 Winnipeg speech used the formulation "Canada's employment growth has been much stronger than other developed countries, but Canada has been much less successful at increasing output per worker" — again, the framing is output per worker, not hours.

This is itself the most interesting political-economy fact in the comparison: Canada's central bank explicitly does not see fewer Canadian hours as a problem to solve. The investment per worker, ICT capital, firm-size distribution, and competition framing dominates the diagnosis. None of the major productivity papers — Rogers, Macklem, Vincent, the OECD Economic Survey: Canada 2025, the C.D. Howe Investment Crisis series, or the StatCan firm-size paper — recommends working more hours.

The sectoral puzzle

Canada has a higher resource intensity than the US (mining, quarrying, oil and gas), and resource extraction is a high-hours sector — typically 40+ hours/week, well above the all-economy mean. Trevor Tombe's July 2024 piece "Canada's resource sector is its productivity powerhouse" makes the point that resource extraction is high-hours AND high-productivity. The US business sector is dominated by manufacturing (about 10% of nonfarm employment, 13.1 million jobs) and services; mining is just 0.5% of US nonfarm employment.

The puzzle: Canada's larger resource share should push Canadian hours up, not down. The fact that Canadian average hours are still below US hours despite a higher-resource economy means non-resource sectors in Canada (services, retail, accommodation) work even shorter hours than their US counterparts. That is consistent with the institutional vacation/holiday story above, and probably with broader unionisation differences in services.

The cross-link to per-capita GDP

The Canada–US per-capita GDP gap can be decomposed into demographics × employment rate × hours per worker × GDP per hour. Statistics Canada (McCormack & Macdonald, March 2026) reports Canada's GDP per capita at 71.4% of the US level in 2024, down from 83.1% in 2014. Of the 28.6 percentage points of gap, hours per worker accounts for about 6 percentage points (the 1,690 vs 1,801 difference). The remaining ~22 points is GDP per hour worked: Canadian labour productivity sits at 71%–75% of the US level depending on PPP basis. The hours gap is the small part of the per-capita GDP gap. The big part is what each Canadian hour produces, not how many hours they put in. See the GDP per capita, labour productivity, and capital per worker compare pages for the productivity story.

What to watch in 2026

1. StatCan Q1 2026 Labour Productivity (early June 2026). First post-Carney-budget snapshot. Watch hours-worked growth in the business sector — Q4 2025 was -0.1%.
2. BLS Productivity & Costs Q1 2026 (early May 2026). First full quarter of the Trump federal RTO mandate. Watch whether US hours bump up.
3. OECD Employment Outlook 2026 (July 2026). The canonical hours-worked dataset annual update. Watch the part-time share lines for both countries.
4. OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2026 (June 2026). Watch the "two-speed North America" diagnosis from the 2025 edition.
5. StatCan Hours Worked and Labour Productivity in the Provinces, 2025 (preliminary) (May 2026). Provincial detail on the resource-sector hours story.
6. BLS Employee Benefits Survey (March 2026). Updated paid leave coverage. Watch whether the share of US private-sector workers with no paid leave (~25%) moves.

The stakes

Hours worked is the small piece of the per-capita GDP comparison and the upbeat half of the work-life-balance comparison. Canadians work roughly 6% fewer hours per worker than Americans, and they get more vacation, more statutory holidays, and have a far smaller share working 50+ hours/week. None of that is a problem in the eyes of Canada's own central bank — the Bank of Canada's productivity diagnosis is about output per hour, not hours per worker, and MacGee and Rodrigue's distributional decomposition shows that hours per working-age adult are roughly the same on both sides of the border when measured properly.

The short version: the Canada–US hours gap is about 110 hours/year and has been remarkably stable; roughly a third of that is the vacation and statutory-holiday institutional difference, another quarter or so is part-time share, and the remainder is weekly hours and sectoral mix. The plateau in both countries since 2022 reflects employment growth being extensive (more workers) rather than intensive (more hours per worker). And the most important framing is the one Canada's central bank has implicitly adopted: this is the part of the Canada–US comparison Canadians should be least worried about. The thing that matters is what each Canadian hour produces.