Romanians don’t work overtime, Eurostat reports says

Romania is among the European countries with the lowest share of employees working overtime, according to data from Eurostat, the European statistics office. Therefore, in 2024, only 1.8% of Romanian employees aged between 20 and 64 declared that they had worked overtime.

At the European Union level, 6.6% of employees worked long hours in 2024, Ziarul Financiar reported.

Eurostat defines long working hours as the schedule of workers who usually spend 49 hours or more per week at work.

The percentage is almost four times lower than the European Union average of 6.6%, and far from the countries at the top of the ranking, such as Greece, where 12.4% of employees worked overtime, or Cyprus and France, which exceed the 9% threshold.

Analysts assign the low overtime in Romania to the high share of employees in the budgetary sector and legal restrictions. Other drivers may be informal arrangements between the employer and employees, and the high share of employees in the manufacturing sector is getting just over the minimum wage.

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