Professionals across the globe spend a lot of time working each year. Most people work a similar amount of hours, typically 40 per week. But, the exact figure can vary a lot depending on many factors.

Calculating this precise amount can be useful for lots of reasons. You may use it for effective budgeting, tracking work-life balance over the long run, and more.

This article will dive deep into the topic and explore how you can calculate total work hours in a year. We’ll also look at how this calculation may change for different schedules, and why it matters for your business.

How many work hours are in a year?

We can give our headline question three answers: a short, long, and complicated one. The short answer is that it varies a lot. The long answer, on the other hand, we can calculate with a bit of math.

Let’s use the standard 40-hour work week for our calculation. Assuming a total of 52 weeks/year (365 days/year / 7 days/week), this means that on average your employees will likely work:

• 40 hours/week × 52 weeks/year = 2080 hours/year

But, you may have noticed the word “likely”. This is because our calculation included no holidays or days off, which there are quite a few of every year. This is where our third answer, the complicated one, comes in.

Calculating work hours in a year

Let’s now calculate a typical amount of work hours in a year in a couple of ways.

Excluding holidays and paid time off

For our first calculation, we’ll exclude your team’s holidays and paid time off from our final result. This will assume that your staff use all of their available PTO and take no unpaid time off throughout the year. Let’s assume your business offers 20 paid days off and 10 holidays. Our calculation will now look like this:

• 2080 hours/year – (20 paid days off + 10 holidays) × 8 work hours/day = 2080 hours/year – 240 off-hours/year = 1840 hours/year

Excluding unpaid time off

Now, let’s assume that a team member takes 5 days of unpaid time off in addition to all paid time off. This will make our final result look like this:

• 1840 hours/year – 5 unpaid days off × 8 work hours/day = 1840 hours/year – 40 unpaid hours off = 1800 hours/year

You may notice there’s one key thing that both of our examples have in common, and that is assumptions. Let’s now explore how to calculate how many work hours are in a year more accurately.

Calculating work hours in a year with a time tracker

Using a time tracker can get you the highest accuracy when calculating work hours in a year. In fact, you won’t have to do any calculations at all. A high-quality tracker like WebWork can automatically track holidays and other days off. Besides this, it can even monitor your team’s idle time, automatically subtracting break hours. As a result, you’ll get more accurate time data for both the year and each day within it.

How different work schedules affect work hours in a year

While most people work the standard 8 hours per day and 5 days per week, many have other schedules. These can impact yearly work time quite a bit, which we’ll explore now.

Flexible working hours

Flexible working hours give people an obvious benefit: flexibility. They allow professionals to work when they want to or when they feel the most productive. But, many schedules even allow employees to work as much as they want each day, provided they complete all of their tasks on time. This makes calculating work hours in a year manually a bit more difficult.

Part-time schedules

A part-time schedule is a popular work type across the world. As you may know, it involves working less than the standard 40 hours per week. Typically, part-time schedules require half the weekly hours of their full-time counterparts. This will mean that a part-time employee will work approximately 1000 hours/year. But, many factors can impact this figure, such as your business’s industry.

Shift-based work arrangements

Shift-based schedules will usually require the standard 2080 work hours/year, assuming full-time employment. But, shifts can last longer than the standard 8 hours in certain industries, such as healthcare. Moreover, shift-based workers may often be required to work double shifts. This adds even more variance to your calculations, making a time tracker essential for accuracy.

Schedules with paid overtime

If you offer paid overtime to your team, calculating work hours in a year can be quite important. This is because in many places around the world, it is common for overtime pay to be higher than regular pay. For example, the UK government’s guidelines on overtime don’t require it to have higher pay. But, most businesses will pay “time and a half” rates across the country. If you want to do this too, a time tracker will be an invaluable tool for your firm.

Why calculating work hours in a year matters for businesses

Before closing off this article, let’s take a look at why you would want to calculate work hours in a year for your business.

Calculating payroll hours

The first reason we’ll explore is to calculate payroll hours accurately. Knowing exactly how much time your team spent working throughout the year can help you verify your monthly calculations. You will be able to ensure that you paid your staff accurately, keeping your firm’s payroll spending in check.

Budgeting for business growth

Closely tied to our last point, you can better control your company’s budget by calculating yearly work hours. This will allow you to use and allocate your organization’s resources more effectively. For example, you can allocate more funds to growing your business with higher-quality offerings.

Ensuring work-life balance

By tracking your team’s work hours in a year, you can ensure they maintained a healthy work-life balance. This balance is quite important for companies. It can not only play a major role in growth but also help improve employee retention in the long run. That being said, you should monitor your team’s work-life balance more frequently than once per year. You should then use yearly work hours to verify data periodically.

Closing thoughts

Calculating work hours in a year can be useful for verifying lots of data. It can be a tricky process, however, which is why you should use a time tracker to get accurate results. This will allow you to find out exactly how much your staff spends working each year, regardless of their work schedules and arrangements. As a result, you’ll be able to use this information for a variety of improvements in your business.