Everyone knows the answer to this one. France. Land of the 35-hour week, the long lunch, the August shutdown, the reflexive strike. The French barely work, and they have built a whole reputation on it.
The reputation is wrong. By the standard measure, average hours worked per person with a job, the country that works the least in the OECD is Germany. In 2024 the average German worker put in 1,334 hours. The average French worker did 1,509, a little below the OECD average of 1,741 and nowhere near the bottom. At the far end sit Mexico and Colombia, both past 2,200 hours, with the United States at 1,796. France is unremarkable.
So the byword for tireless northern efficiency turns out to have the shortest working year in the developed world. That is worth the walk to a colleague's desk on its own. But it is also a trap, because "hours per worker" is a slippery thing to measure, and the moment you nudge the question the answer turns over.
That number only counts people who already have a job. It measures how long the average worker's year is, not how many people are working at all. Ask the second question instead, what share of working-age people are employed, and Germany stops looking lazy entirely. About 82% of Germans aged 25 to 64 are in work, one of the higher rates anywhere in the OECD. Nearly everyone works. Each of them just works fewer hours.
At which point the bottom of the table changes completely. The places where the smallest share of people work are Turkey (61%), Italy and Costa Rica (around 70%), Mexico and Greece. Italy is the exact photographic negative of Germany: Italian workers put in long hours, 1,715 a year, well above the average, but far fewer of them work at all. Germany spreads its work thinly across many people. Italy piles it onto fewer. One country looks idle per worker and busy per head, the other busy per worker and idle per head. They are opposite shapes, and "which one works less" has no answer that survives both questions.
Where is France in all this? Below the OECD average on hours, below it on employment, and tenth or eleventh from the bottom on each, never the extreme on either. Whatever the French reputation rests on, it is not these numbers. It survives because there is always one measure that flatters the prior, and you quietly ignore the other.
There is even a third way to count, and it settles nothing. Multiply hours per worker by the share of people working and you get hours per working-age person, the total labour a society draws out of everyone, employed or not. On that measure Germany is still at the very bottom, because the part-time effect is that powerful. France comes sixth from the bottom. Three honest measures, three different answers, and they do not agree.
Which is the whole point. "Working the least" is not a fact waiting in the data to be read off. It is a choice of question, and the choice does the work. Hours per worker, share employed, or hours per head: pick one and Germany is the laziest country in the OECD; pick another and it is among the most industrious; either way France is somewhere in the middle, minding its own business. Hardworking, it turns out, is a word people reach for, not a number they checked.
Data: OECD, 2024, via the SDMX API. Average annual hours actually worked per worker from DF_AVG_ANN_HRS_WKD (all workers, full- and part-time). Employment rate for ages 25-64 from DF_LSO_NEAC_EMP. Hours per working-age person is the two multiplied, an approximation of total labour input. Averaging full- and part-time together is why a country with lots of part-time work, like Germany, shows a low figure per worker while still employing most of its people. The United States and Iceland lack a 2024 employment figure in this dataset, and Turkiye lacks an hours figure, so each appears in only one of the rankings. Single year, no trend implied. Pulled with oecd-mcp.