Overview
- An analysis of 34 million listings shows only 0.12% of German job ads offered a four-day week in 2024, totaling 8,653 postings.
- The reduced 32-hour week with full pay appeared in about one in 20,000 adverts, underscoring its very limited uptake.
- Offers are concentrated in male-dominated skilled trades and in shortage occupations such as medical healthcare where other flexibility is limited.
- Employers deploy the four-day option chiefly to make hard-to-fill roles more attractive and to retain qualified staff, the study reports.
- Bertelsmann describes the model as one piece of broader working-time flexibilization and notes the share has barely changed since 2019.