Although most employees work full-time schedules, part-time work is becoming more common as staff seek more flexibility and a better work-life balance. Companies may also be keen to hire part-time to limit costs and cope with changing workloads.
According to Eurostat, 17.1% of employed people in the EU worked part-time in 2024. Eurostat defines a part-time worker as someone who typically works fewer hours than an equivalent full-time worker in their main job.
The OECD notes that this typically means working fewer than 30 hours per week, and this applies to both employees and the self-employed.
Prices throughout Europe
Part-time employment rates in 33 European countries range from 1.5% in Bulgaria to 40.5% in Switzerland, followed closely by the Netherlands at 38.9%.
The proportion is also very high in Austria and Germany, where around 3 in 10 people work part-time.
At the other end of the ranking, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia and Hungary have a share of less than 5%.
This figure represents a regional pattern across Europe, showing that there is generally much less part-time work in the Balkans and Eastern Europe than in Western and Northern Europe.
women, young people, elderly people
“Women, young people, older people and people with reduced working capacity are more likely to prefer part-time employment. Therefore, countries with higher employment rates for these groups tend to have higher levels of part-time work,” Lhasa Miedzien and Sandra Kurturien from the Lithuanian Center for Social Sciences told Euronews Business.
For example, in 2024, the Netherlands had the highest female employment rate in the EU, 12.7 percentage points above the EU average. The employment rate for young people (15-24 years old) in the Netherlands was more than 40 percentage points higher, and the employment rate for older people (60-64 years old) was more than 15 percentage points higher.
“All these indicators were significantly above the EU-27 average. In contrast, countries where these groups are less active in the labor market tend to have lower levels of part-time employment,” they said.
For example, in Bulgaria, the youth employment rate was less than half the EU average.
“Part-time jobs are also more common in service-oriented sectors such as retail, health care, education, and hospitality, where staffing needs change throughout the day or week,” Miedzien and Kulturien said.
service and manufacturing
The researchers also noted that employers are using part-time contracts to achieve staffing flexibility, reduce labor costs, and adapt to fluctuations in demand. For example, mini-jobs form an important part of the German labor market and create a large number of part-time positions.
According to ILO statistics for 2023, service sector employment accounted for more than 80% of total employment in Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, while it was significantly lower in South-Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Romania) and Central European countries (Poland, Slovakia and Hungary).
“Most Eastern European economies are strongly manufacturing-oriented and full-time employment is the norm,” they added.
Wage levels are also a factor. Miedzien and Kulturien pointed out that while part-time work can earn a good income in high-wage economies, it may become uneconomical in low-wage economies, reducing both workers’ benefits and employers’ offers.
“This helps explain why part-time employment remains relatively low in many Eastern European countries,” they said.
dramatic gender disparity
There is also a strong gender pattern. Part-time employment rates are much higher for women than for men, totaling 27.8% and 7.7%.
In Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria, more than half of employed women work part-time. Germany is also very close to that level.
The only exceptions are Romania, where this rate is slightly higher for men, and no difference in Bulgaria.
When part-time employment rates are low, the gender gap is smaller in absolute numbers, but may still be large in relative terms.
“The main reason[for the gap]is historical differences both in the position of women in the labor market and in the development of the labor market more generally,” Professor Mara Yerkes from Utrecht University told Euronews Business.
She pointed out that the historical development of part-time work in the Netherlands was initially driven by the need for more workers amid labor shortages in the 1960s. In 1957, the Netherlands repealed its anti-marriage law, which required women to quit certain jobs when they got married.
“Increasingly, part-time work has come to be seen as a way for women to combine caregiving and paid work. Women were and still are seen as responsible for most caregiving and household chores,” she says.
Mara Yerkes said that in various countries part-time work was entrenched by other labor market developments, such as the desire for collective shorter working hours in exchange for slower wage increases in the early 1980s. As a result, part-time work has become very common, accepted and protected, and continues to be particularly popular among women.
Stan de Spiegelare of Ghent University also identifies several factors that influence part-time employment rates. These include changing cultural norms around women’s work and wage stagnation, where full-time employment becomes insufficient for a ‘family wage’ and people are forced to take second jobs. He also pointed to inadequate infrastructure that limits mothers’ ability to work full-time, and to countries such as Germany that have increasingly flexible labor regulations.